Stravinsky: Pulcinella / The Song of the Nightingale Review
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Ballet 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving the Ballet
Ballet 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving the Ballet Review
Ballet 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving the Ballet Feature
Veteran dance writer Robert Greskovic's comprehensive handbook on how to watch and appreciate the ballet is now available in this new edition. It includes a complete analysis of sixteen important and popular ballets, from Swan Lake to Twyla Tharp's Push Comes To Shove. As Mikhail Baryshnikov states in the book's foreword: "All the things that ballet fans talk about at intermission, while newcomers stand there wondering what they mean: those things are here...(Robert Greskovic) has been thinking about ballet --- watching it, reading, writing, and talking about it --- day after day for more than thirty years. He knows it through and through. Now he shares his knowledge."
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Monday, September 12, 2011
Oxford Dictionary of Current English
Oxford Dictionary of Current English Review
Oxford Dictionary of Current English Feature
The Oxford Dictionary of Current English is the most comprehensive paperback dictionary of its kind, providing full and up-to-date coverage of English as it is used today around the world.
The Dictionary offers over 120,000 words, phrases, and definitions, and uses a straightforward writing style that avoids technical language, ensuring that definitions are even clearer than before. This edition includes over two hundred new definitions, words from technology, current events, or popular culture that have only recently become part of our mainstream language, such as "A-list," "domain name," and "WMD." It uses thousands of examples to illustrate idiomatic usage, showing how words and phrases are used in everyday speech. In addition, all irregular noun, verb, and adjectival inflections are spelled out in full, while in-text notes provide guidance on grammar and good usage. All of these features are presented in new layout designed to be as clear as possible, making information easily accessible and the definition you are looking for a snap to find.
Compact and portable, with high quality binding and covers, the Oxford Dictionary of Current English is perfect for everyday reference, at home, at school, or in the office. No one should be without this incredibly useful volume, while students and authors will find it an indispensable tool.
Features:
· The most comprehensive paperback dictionary of its kind
· Over 120,000 words, phrases, and definitions
· Simple writing style makes definitions even clearer than before
· Full and up-to-date coverage of English as it is used today around the world
· Over 200 spelling notes give advice on commonly misspelled words, such as 'accommodate' and 'receive'
· Additional usage notes offering advice on good English and commonly confused words
· Additional help with the pronunciation of difficult words
· Thousands of real examples of usage show how the language works in context
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Saturday, September 10, 2011
Friday, September 9, 2011
The Psychology of Music, Second Edition (Academic Press Series in Cognition and Perception)
The Psychology of Music, Second Edition (Academic Press Series in Cognition and Perception) Review
The Psychology of Music, Second Edition (Academic Press Series in Cognition and Perception) Feature
The aim of the psychology of music is to understand musical phenomena in terms of mental functions--to characterize the ways in which one perceives, remembers, creates, and performs music. Since the First Edition of The Psychology of Music was published the field has emerged from an interdisciplinary curiosity into a fully ramified subdiscipline of psychology due to several factors. The opportunity to generate, analyze, and transform sounds by computer is no longer limited to a few researchers with access to large multi-user facilities, but rather is available to individual investigators on a widespread basis. Second, dramatic advances in the field of neuroscience have profoundly influenced thinking about the way that music is processed in the brain. Third, collaborations between psychologists and musicians, which were evolving at the time the First Edition was written, are now quite common; to a large extent now speaking a common language and agreeing on basic philosophical issues.
The Psychology of Music, Second Edition has been completely revised to bring the reader the most up-to-date information, additional subject matter, and new contributors to incorporate all of these important variables.
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Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Susan Kander Five Movements for My Father
Susan Kander Five Movements for My Father Review
Susan Kander Five Movements for My Father Feature
For better or worse, I don t come from the academy, I come from the theater. My roots run deep in musical theater especially. Though these two song cycles Five Movements for my Father and A Cycle of Songs are quite different musically one from the other, they are both essentially mini-operas, monodramas: in each one, the singer portrays one character at critical moments over his or her lifetime. Music allows us to live more viscerally through these moments with them. Five Movements for my Father tells the story of a man s life: we meet him way back in the last century as an exuberant college student, follow him to 1930 s Paris as a young poet, return home with the excited GI after WWII. Decades later he looks back over his lengthening marriage and finally, now an old man after the turn of the 21st century, he vents his anger and sadness at the current state of his beloved America. The music loosely follows the times and locales, starting in the ultra-romantic 20th century, on to pointillist France, back to swing era USA, before drifting loose into the latter 20th century. I wrote this piece in 2005 for my father for his 82nd birthday. I think A Cycle of Songs, written in 1999, as a more real frau s Liebe und Leben. In the seven movements of the cycle from honeymoon, through pregnancy, children, exhaustion, sexual re-awakening, the balancing act between gaining grandchildren and losing parents we learn the very real, un-idealized story of a woman from the dreams she tells the person next to her in bed, until, finally, she has no dreams, for there is no one there to tell them to. I chose my marvelous singers Keith and Roberta not only for their delicious voices but because they each have a magical way of bringing characters to life with those voices. They make me feel warm through and through when they sing; they make me cry in all the right places. And laugh. And I believe their every word. Their sheer musicianship is thrilling. I am so very fortunate to hear my music performed to hear my characters brought to life by these two superb American singers. Clarinetist Lino Gomez plays throughout this album with exquisite style, élan and theatricality. Sublime cellist Eric Bartlett joins him dancing, flying and jazzing through Pas de Deux for Clarinet, Cello and Chimes, the sorbet between the two entrees. Maestro Mercurio brings the Five Movements into living, breathing focus while pianist Tom Schmidt and violinist Suzanne Ornstein, contribute, respectively, endless artistry and an elegant Grappelli swing.
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Tuesday, September 6, 2011
The Billboard Encyclopedia of Classical Music
The Billboard Encyclopedia of Classical Music Review
The Billboard Encyclopedia of Classical Music Feature
Classical music finally has the reference it deserves: Authoritative, expertly written, and all-inclusive, The Billboard Encyclopedia of Classical Music is a comprehensive, affordable companion to a timeless genre. Organized chronologically, with copious cross-references, this encyclopedia begins on a high note with a foreword by acclaimed pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy. It then traces the history of classical music from medieval times to the 21st century, highlighting key events and movements, providing biographical details on composers and performers, and examining the instruments and techniques. General editor Stanley Sadie draws on the expertise of a wide range of professional writers, educators, and musicians to place the major developments within their cultural and historical contexts. With rich details and surprising insights on most every aspect of classical music, The Billboard Encyclopedia of Classical Music is essential reading for composers, performers, and enthusiasts.
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Monday, September 5, 2011
Music in the Human Experience: An Introduction to Music Psychology
Music in the Human Experience: An Introduction to Music Psychology Review
Music in the Human Experience: An Introduction to Music Psychology Feature
All human societies in every corner of the globe engage in music. For many, it occupies a primary role. Taken collectively, these musical experiences are widely varied, hugely complex affairs. How did human beings come to be musical creatures? How and why do our bodies respond to music? Why do people have emotional responses to music? This textbook seeks to understand and explain these phenomena that are at the core of what it means to be a human being.
Music in the Human Experience: An Introduction to Music Psychology is a textbook for college courses in music psychology, primarily geared to students of music. It incorporates several other disciplines to provide an explanation for why and how we make sense of music and respond to it, cognitively, physically, and emotionally.
Features
- Comprehensive Coverage--Includes philosophical issues, biomusic, anthropology, ethnomusicology, acoustics, hearing, music perception and cognition, psychophysiological responses to music, emotional responses, music and the brain, personality, identity, music performance, learning theories, music and health, and social aspects of music.
- Media Tutorials—A series of 32 narrated media presentations incorporating photographs, drawings, animations, recordings of singers, instrumentalists, and ensembles, and several interactive media files that illustrate key concepts of the text.
- Pedagogical Aids—Discussion questions at the end of each chapter provide teachers and students with an opportunity to reflect on key concepts presented in the text and to consider ideas, such as how information applies to their musical lives and careers. In addition, there is an extensive glossary and Companion Website with brief quizzes, flash cards of key terms, and supplemental reading lists.
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Sunday, September 4, 2011
Oxford Mini Dictionary and Thesaurus (Dictionary/Thesaurus)
Oxford Mini Dictionary and Thesaurus (Dictionary/Thesaurus) Review
Oxford Mini Dictionary and Thesaurus (Dictionary/Thesaurus) Feature
Combining two essential language resources in one small package, this marvelous combined dictionary and thesaurus offers a portable, compact, and convenient reference to the English language. The Oxford Mini Dictionary & Thesaurus is small enough to fit easily into a bag or backpack, providing help with studies and solutions to everyday language problems and puzzles, wherever you may be.
Containing over 40,000 words, phrases, and definitions, and over 65,000 synonyms--all of the words you need to know for everyday use--this Second Edition features an attractive new design so that you can find what you need easily. The new design includes a closer meshing of the dictionary and thesaurus text, so that the synonyms for a particular word sit directly alongside the definition of that word, so that you have the meaning of a word and alternative word choices in one handy place. In addition, a new center section packed with language reference information makes this dictionary and thesaurus a one-stop tool that will help to solve your grammar and spelling queries.
The perfect resource for people on the go, Oxford Mini Dictionary and Thesaurus blends portability and authority in the most comprehensive reference work of its size.
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Saturday, September 3, 2011
Liaison: the Gripping Real Story of the Diplomat Spy and the Chinese Opera Star
Liaison: the Gripping Real Story of the Diplomat Spy and the Chinese Opera Star Review
Liaison: the Gripping Real Story of the Diplomat Spy and the Chinese Opera Star Feature
The story behind the Broadway play M. Butterfly chronicles the strange love affair between a French diplomat in Beijing and a mysterious opera singer, a liaison in which the Frenchman is unaware that his lover is a man. 30,000 first printing. $30,000 ad/promo.
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