I Live in Music


Book Description

Shange's lyrical poem is a tribute to the language of music and the magical, often mystical, rhythms that connect people. Music defines who we are as individuals, the places where we live, and how we exist within our communities. Music is life.Written in a syncopated style that has its own melody, the poem is perfectly married to twenty-one extraordinary and diverse works from Romare Bearden who once said, "I paint in the tradition of the blues."Here is a unique and visionary book that speaks, indeed sings, to both children and adults and is, at once, compelling, profond, and entertaining.




Go-Go Live


Book Description

Go-go is the conga drum–inflected black popular music that emerged in Washington, D.C., during the 1970s. The guitarist Chuck Brown, the "Godfather of Go-Go," created the music by mixing sounds borrowed from church and the blues with the funk and flavor that he picked up playing for a local Latino band. Born in the inner city, amid the charred ruins of the 1968 race riots, go-go generated a distinct culture and an economy of independent, almost exclusively black-owned businesses that sold tickets to shows and recordings of live go-gos. At the peak of its popularity, in the 1980s, go-go could be heard around the capital every night of the week, on college campuses and in crumbling historic theaters, hole-in-the-wall nightclubs, backyards, and city parks. Go-Go Live is a social history of black Washington told through its go-go music and culture. Encompassing dance moves, nightclubs, and fashion, as well as the voices of artists, fans, business owners, and politicians, Natalie Hopkinson's Washington-based narrative reflects the broader history of race in urban America in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. In the 1990s, the middle class that had left the city for the suburbs in the postwar years began to return. Gentrification drove up property values and pushed go-go into D.C.'s suburbs. The Chocolate City is in decline, but its heart, D.C.'s distinctive go-go musical culture, continues to beat. On any given night, there's live go-go in the D.C. metro area.




A Song to Sing, a Life to Live


Book Description

Celebrating the spirit of song In A Song to Sing, a Life to Live, Don and Emily Saliers help readers see the connections between Saturday night music and Sunday morning music by exploring the spiritual dimensions of music itself. They tell the stories of their own lives in music, and they share what they have learned and observed about the power of music in human life. They help us appreciate the joy of music and also how music carries us into places of sorrow, where we must go if we are to live with honesty about ourselves and compassion for others. This book is for churchgoers and spiritual seekers alike. Music is described in terms of spiritual practice; it has the power to embrace those who are deeply immersed in the life of Christian faith and speak to those who are spiritual but may question formal religion. The book explores a wide variety of musical traditions and offers an invitation to embrace a broader and deeper vision of the power of music and the spiritual dimensions of attentive listening. "This is a beautiful expression of music as many things--healer, gift, symbol of freedom and community, and agent of change" (Mary Chapin Carpenter).







Everyone Loves Live Music


Book Description

For decades, millions of music fans have gathered every summer in parks and fields to hear their favorite bands at festivals such as Lollapalooza, Coachella, and Glastonbury. How did these and countless other festivals across the globe evolve into glamorous pop culture events, and how are they changing our relationship to music, leisure, and public culture? In Everyone Loves Live Music, Fabian Holt looks beyond the marketing hype to show how festivals and other institutions of musical performance have evolved in recent decades, as sites that were once meaningful sources of community and culture are increasingly subsumed by corporate giants. Examining a diverse range of cases across Europe and the United States, Holt upends commonly-held ideas of live music and introduces a pioneering theory of performance institutions. He explores the fascinating history of the club and the festival in San Francisco and New York, as well as a number of European cities. This book also explores the social forces shaping live music as small, independent venues become corporatized and as festivals transform to promote mainstream Anglophone culture and its consumerist trappings. The book further provides insight into the broader relationship between culture and community in the twenty-first century. An engaging read for fans, industry professionals, and scholars alike, Everyone Loves Live Music reveals how our contemporary enthusiasm for live music is more fraught than we would like to think.




Performing Electronic Music Live


Book Description

Performing Electronic Music Live lays out conceptual approaches, tools, and techniques for electronic music performance, from DJing, DAWs, MIDI controllers, traditional instruments, live sound design, hardware setups, custom software and hardware, to live visuals, venue acoustics, and live show promotion. Through case studies and contrasting tutorials by successful artists, Kirsten Hermes explores the many different ways in which you can create memorable experiences on stage. Featuring interviews with highly accomplished musicians and practitioners, readers can also expand on their knowledge with hands-on video tutorials for each chapter via the companion website, performingelectronicmusic.live. Performing Electronic Music Live is an essential, all-encompassing resource for professionals, students of music production courses, and researchers in the field of creative-focused performance technology.




The Digital Evolution of Live Music


Book Description

The concept of 'live' has changed as a consequence of mediated culture. Interaction may occur in real time, but not necessarily in shared physical spaces with others. The Digital Evolution of Live Music considers notions of live music in time and space as influenced by digital technology. This book presents the argument that live music is a special case in digital experience due to its liminal status between mind and body, words and feelings, sight and sound, virtual and real. Digital live music occupies a multimodal role in a cultural contextual landscape shaped by technological innovation. The book consists of three sections. The first section looks at fan perspectives, digital technology and the jouissance of live music and music festival fans. The second section discusses music in popular culture, exploring YouTube and live music video culture and gaming soundtracks, followed by the concluding section which investigates the future of live music and digital culture. - Gives perspectives on the function of live music in digital culture and the role of digital in live music - Focuses on the interaction between live and digital music - Takes the discussion of live music beyond economics and marketing, to the cultural and philosophical implications of digital culture for the art - Includes interviews with producers and players in the digital world of music production - Furthers debate by looking at access to digital music via social media, websites, and applications that recognise the impact of digital culture on the live music experience




Live Wires


Book Description

We live in an electronic world, saturated with electronic sounds. Yet, electronic sounds aren’t a new phenomenon; they have long permeated our sonic landscape. What began as the otherworldly sounds of the film score for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet and the rarefied, new timbres of Stockhausen’s Kontakte a few years later, is now a common soundscape in technology, media, and an array of musical genres and subgenres. More people than ever before can produce and listen to electronic music, from isolated experimenters, classical and jazz musicians, to rock musicians, sound recordists, and the newer generations of electronic musicians making hip-hop, house, techno, and ambient music. Increasingly we are listening to electronic sounds, finding new meanings in them, experimenting with them, and rehearing them as listeners and makers. Live Wires explores how five key electronic technologies—the tape recorder, circuit, computer, microphone, and turntable—revolutionized musical thought. Featuring the work of major figures in electronic music—including everyone from Schaeffer, Varèse, Xenakis, Babbitt, and Oliveros to Eno, Keith Emerson, Grandmaster Flash, Juan Atkins, and Holly Herndon—Live Wires is an arresting discussion of the powerful musical ideas that are being recycled, rethought, and remixed by the most interesting electronic composers and musicians today.




The Live Music Business


Book Description

The Live Music Business: Management and Production of Concerts and Festivals, Third Edition, shines a light on the enigmatic live music business, offering a wealth of inside advice and trade secrets to artists and bands looking to make a living in the industry. Previously published as The Tour Book, this new edition has been extensively revised, reorganized, and updated to reflect today’s music industry. This practical guidebook examines the roles of the key players – from booking agents to concert promoters, artist managers to talent buyers – and the deals, conventions, and processes that drive this global business. Written by a touring professional with over 25 years of experience, this book elucidates why playing live is crucial to the success of any musician, band, or artist, explaining issues like: what managers, promoters, and agents do and how they arrange shows and tours; how to understand and negotiate show contracts; how to create a contract rider, and how the rider affects the money you earn from a show; how to appear professional and knowledgeable in an industry with its own conventions, language, and baffling technical terms; and a three-year plan using live performance to kickstart your music career Intended for music artists and students, The Live Music Business presents proven live-music career strategies, covering every aspect of putting on a live show, from rehearsing and soundchecks to promotions, marketing, and contracts. In an era when performing live is more essential than ever, this is the go-to guidebook for getting your show on the road and making a living from music.




Researching Live Music


Book Description

Researching Live Music offers an important contribution to the emergent field of live music studies. Featuring paradigmatic case studies, this book is split into four parts, first addressing perspectives associated with production, then promotion and consumption, and finally policy. The contributors to the book draw on a range of methodological and theoretical positions to provide a critical resource that casts new light on live music processes and shows how live music events have become central to raising and discussing broader social and cultural issues. Their case studies expand our knowledge of how live music events work and extend beyond the familiar contexts of the United States and United Kingdom to include examples drawn from Argentina, Australia, France, Jamaica, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Poland. Researching Live Music is the first comprehensive review of the different ways in which live music can be studied as an interdisciplinary field, including innovative approaches to the study of historic and contemporary live music events. It represents a crucial reading for professionals, students, and researchers working in all aspects of live music.