New at the Library

Reviewed: NYT/BR 5 Dec. 2021 p. 58.
Description: Known for her prodigious musical talent, her timeless blues narratives about personal and socioeconomic problems, her tough persona, and her innate ability to enrapture audiences with her raw voice, Bessie Smith–the Empress of the Blues–receives a unique biographical treatment in this special life narrative captured by one of Scotland’s finest poets. By masterfully blending research, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and her own experiences in listening to Bessie Smith, Jackie Kay brings Smith to life, chronicling her humble beginnings in Tennessee to her national touring and recording success to her troubled relationships and her tragic end. The result is a lyrical tribute that not only captures Smith’s personality but manages to reproduce her voice as her lyrics echo throughout the text. Bessie Smith lives on, and as Kay argues, she is relevant now more than ever.

Reviewed: NYT 25 Aug. 2020 p. C5
Description: A leader of the 1960s folk revival, Odetta is one of the most important singers of the last hundred years. Her music has influenced a huge number of artists over many decades, including Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, the Kinks, Jewel, and, more recently, Rhiannon Giddens and Miley Cyrus. But Odetta’s importance extends far beyond music. Journalist Ian Zack follows Odetta from her beginnings in deeply segregated Birmingham, Alabama, to stardom in San Francisco and New York. Odetta used her fame to bring attention to the civil rights movement, working alongside Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, and other artists. Her opera-trained voice echoed at the 1963 March on Washington and the Selma to Montgomery march, and she arranged a tour throughout the deeply segregated South. Her “Freedom Trilogy” songs became rallying cries for protesters everywhere. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 19 Dec. 2019 p. 72.
Description: One of the most important ballet choreographers of all time, Marius Petipa (1818-1910) created works that are now mainstays of the ballet repertoire. The first biography in English of this monumental figure of ballet history, this work covers the choreographer’s life and work in full within the con-text of remarkable historical and political surroundings. Over the course of ten well-researched chapters, Nadine Meisner explores Marius Petipa’s life and legacy: the artist’s arrival in Russia from his native France, the socio-political tensions and revolution he experienced, his popularity on the Russian imperial stage, his collaborations with other choreographers and composers (most famously Tchaikovsky), and the conditions under which he worked, in close proximity to the imperial court. Meisner presents a thrilling and exhaustive narrative not only of Petipa’s life but of the cultural development of ballet across the 19th and early 20th centuries. The book also extends beyond Petipa’s narrative with insightful analyses of the evolution of ballet technique, theatre genres, and the rise of male dancers. … As Meisner demonstrates, the choreographer laid the foundations for Soviet ballet and for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the expatriate company which exercised such an enormous influence on ballet in the West, including the Royal Ballet and Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. (publ.)

Description: Offers the first in-depth study of these notebooks and their owner, reanimating Anna Magdalena as a multifaceted historical subject–at once pious and bawdy, spirited and tragic. In these pages, we follow Magdalena from young and flamboyant performer to bereft and impoverished widow–and visit along the way the coffee house, the raucous wedding feast, and the family home. David Yearsley explores the notebooks’ more idiosyncratic entries–like its charming ditties on illicit love and searching ruminations on mortality–against the backdrop of the social practices and concerns that women shared in eighteenth-century Lutheran Germany, from status in marriage and widowhood, to fulfilling professional and domestic roles, money, fashion, intimacy and sex, and the ever-present sickness and death of children and spouses. What emerges is a humane portrait of a musician who embraced the sensuality of song and the uplift of the keyboard, a sometimes ribald wife and oft-bereaved mother who used her cherished musical notebooks for piety and play, humor and devotion. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 25 Nov. 2018 p. 1; FA 97(6) Nov./Dec. 2018 p. 217; LR Dec. 2018/Jan. 2019 p. 26.
Description: Based on ten years of research and a vast cache of primary sources located in archives in Warsaw, Paris, London, New York, and Washington, D.C., this book is a corrective work intended to dispel the many myths and legends that continue to surround Chopin, and an intimate look into a dramatic life. Of particular focus are Chopin’s childhood and youth in Poland, which are brought into line with the latest scholarly findings; his often-times troubled romantic life with George Sand, with whom he lived for nine years; and his untimely death at age thirty-nine, which inspired three thousand people to flock to the Madeleine Church in Paris for his funeral. Written in highly readable prose, Fryderyk Chopin wears its scholarship lightly: this is a book suited as much for the professional pianist as it is for the casual music lover. (publ.)

Description: Acclaimed Scottish singer Jean Redpath (1937-2014) is best remembered for her impressive repertoire of ancient ballads, Robert Burns songs, and con-temporary folk music, recorded and performed over a career spanning some fifty years, from the 1960s until her death in 2014. Mark Brownrigg helps capture Redpath’s idiosyncratic and often humorous voice through his interviews with her during the last eighteen months of her life. Here Redpath reflects on her humble beginnings, her Scottish heritage, her life’s journey, and her mission of preserving, performing, and teaching traditional song. A native of Edinburgh, Redpath was raised in a family of singers of traditional Scots songs. She broadened her knowledge of the tradition through work with the Edinburgh Folk Society and later as a student of Scottish studies at Edinburgh University. Prior to graduation, Redpath abandoned her studies to follow her passion of singing. Her independent spirit took her to the United States, where she found commercial success amid the Greenwich Village folk-music revival in New York in the 1960s. There she shared a house and concert stages with Bob Dylan and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Often praised for her unaccompanied, gentle voice, Redpath received a rave review in the New York Times, which launched her career and lead to her wide recognition as a true voice of traditional Scottish songs. As a regular guest on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” radio show, Redpath endeared herself to millions with her soft melodies and amusing tales. Her extensive knowledge of traditional Scottish music history led to appointments as artist in residence at universities in the United States and Scotland, where she taught courses on traditional song. Among her final performances was a 2009 appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Sept. 2019 vol. 57 no. 1 (Recommended for community college libraries)
Description: The vibrant intellectual, social and political climate of mid eighteenth-century Europe presented opportunities and challenges for artists and musicians alike. This book focuses on Mozart the man and musician as he responds to different aspects of that world. It reveals his views on music, aesthetics and other matters; on places in Austria and across Eu-rope that shaped his life; on career contexts and environments, including patronage, activities as an impresario, publishing, theatrical culture and financial matters; on engagement with performers and performance, focusing on Mozart’s experiences as a practicing musician; and on reception and legacy from his own time through to the present day. Probing diverse Mozartian contexts in a variety of ways, the contributors reflect the vitality of existing scholarship and point towards areas primed for further study. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Aug. 2019 vol. 56 no. 12); Essential; Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: At the end of the nineteenth century, vaudeville began to re-place minstrelsy as America’s favorite form of stage entertainment. Segregation necessitated the creation of discrete African American vaudeville theaters. When these venues first gained popularity, ragtime coon songs were the standard fare. Black vaudeville theaters provided a safe haven where coon songs could be rehabilitated. Dynamic interaction between the performers and their audience unleashed creative energies that accelerated the development of the blues. The first blues star of black vaudeville was Butler “String Beans” May, a blackface comedian, pianist, singer, and dancer from Montgomery, Alabama. Before his senseless death in 1917, he was recognized as the “blues master piano player of the world.” His legacy, elusive and previously unacknowledged, is preserved in the repertoire of country blues singer-guitarists and pianists of the Race recording era. While male blues singers remained tethered to the role of blackface comedian, female “coon shouters” acquired a more dignified aura in the emergent persona of the “blues queen.” Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and most of their contemporaries came through this portal; while others, including for-gotten blues heroine Ora Criswell and her protégé Trixie Smith, reconfigured the use of blackface for their own subversive purposes. (publ.)

Reviewed: Economist 22 Dec. 2018 p. 39 (referenced)
Description: Polyphony–the interweaving of simultaneous sounds–is a crucial aspect of music that has deep implications for how we understand the mind. Peter Pesic examines the history and significance of “polyphonicity”–of “many-voicedness”–in human experience. He presents the emergence of Western polyphony, its flowering, its horizons, and the perspective it offers on our own polyphonic brains. When we listen to polyphonic music, how is it that we can hear several different things at once? How does a single mind experience those things as a unity (a motet, a fugue) rather than an incoherent jumble? Pesic argues that polyphony raises fundamental issues for philosophy, theology, literature, psychology, and neuroscience–all searching for the apparent unity of consciousness in the midst of multiple simultaneous experiences. After tracing the development of polyphony in Western music from ninth-century church music through the experimental compositions of Glenn Gould and John Cage, Pesic considers the analogous activity within the brain, the polyphonic “music of the hemispheres” that shapes brain states from sleep to awakening. He discusses how neuroscientists draw on concepts from polyphony to describe the “neural orchestra” of the brain. Pesic’s story begins with ancient conceptions of God’s mind and ends with the polyphonic personhood of the human brain and body. (publ.)

Reviewed: WSJ 9/10 Mar. 2019 p. C12 (referenced)
Description: A revelatory portrait of the creative partnership that transformed musical theater and provided the soundtrack to the American Century. They stand at the apex of the great age of songwriting, the creators of the classic Broadway musicals Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music, whose songs have never lost their popularity or emotional power. Even before they joined forces, Richard Rodgers and Os-car Hammerstein II had written dozens of Broadway shows, but together they pioneered a new art form: the serious musical play. Their songs and dance numbers served to advance the drama and reveal character, a sharp break from the past and the template on which all future musicals would be built. Though different in personality and often emotionally distant from each other, Rodgers and Hammerstein presented an unbroken front to the world and forged much more than a songwriting team; their part-nership was also one of the most profitable and powerful entertainment businesses of their era. They were cultural powerhouses whose work came to define postwar America on stage, screen, television, and radio. But they also had their failures and flops, and more than once they feared they had lost their touch. (publ.)
… “the gold standard for a Broadway book is Todd Purdum’s Something Wonderful” (WSJ).

Reviewed: Choice (Aug. 2019 vol. 56 no. 12); Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Examines the concept of the piano teacher as someone who is more than just a teacher of a musical skill, but also someone who wields tremendous influence on the development of a young person’s artistic and empathic potential, as well as their lifelong personal motivational framework. The specific attributes of today’s students are explored, including family and peer influences from interpersonal relationships to social media. Additionally, students from specific circumstances are discussed, including those with special needs such as Autism Spectrum Disorders, ADHD, and Depression. Finally, motivation of a teacher’s students is related to a teacher’s own motivation in their work, as a cycle of positivity and achievement will be recommended as a way to keep an instructor's work fresh and exciting. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 2 Dec. 2018 p. 54; Choice (Jul 2019 vol. 56 no. 11); Top 75 Titles recommended for community college libraries.
Description: James Sullivan delivers a lively anecdotal history of the progressive movements that have shaped the growth of the United States, and the songs that have accompanied and defined them. Covering one hundred years of social conflict and progress across the twentieth century and into the early years of the twenty-first, this book reveals how protest songs have given voice to the needs and challenges of a nation and asked its citizens to take a stand. … Fifty years before Vietnam, before the United States entered World War I, some of the most popular sheet music in the country featured anti-war tunes. The labor movement of the early decades of the century was fueled by its communal “songbook.” The Civil Rights movement was soundtracked not just by the gorgeous melodies of “Strange Fruit” and “A Change Is Gonna Come,” but hundreds of other gospel-tinged ballads and blues. (publ.)

Description: In the years spanning from 1800 to 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven completed nine symphonies, now considered among the greatest masterpieces of Western music. …Martin Geck opens the book with an enthralling series of cultural, political, and musical motifs that run throughout the symphonies. A leading theme is Beethoven’s intense intellectual and emotional engagement with the figure of Napoleon, an engagement that survived even Beethoven’s disappointment with Napoleon’s decision to be crowned emperor in 1804. (publ.)
Note: Originally published as: Die Sinfonien Beethovens: Neun Wege zum Ideenkunstwerk (Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag, 2015).

Reviewed: CHE 11 Aug. 2017 (new books)
Description: A new look at the life, times, and music of Polish composer and piano virtuoso Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1849). This collection offers for the first time in English an extended tribute to Chopin published in Poland upon his death and contemporary Polish writings contextualizing Chopin's compositional strategies. (publ.)

Description: Chronicles Bessie Smith’s vital contribution to and influence on music, the music industry, and the recording industry. While her recording career lasted only a decade, she toured long before setting her music to vinyl, with much of her early career amply documented. Singers from Billie Holiday to Janis Joplin were influenced by her work, and both musicians and music lovers today continue to be entranced by her unmistakable style. (publ.)

Reviewed: WSJ 15/16 July 2017 p. C9; Choice Nov 2017 vol. 55 no. 3 (recommended for community college libraraies)
Description: Bix Beiderbecke was one of the first great legends of jazz. Among the most innovative cornet soloists of the 1920s and the first important white player, he invented the jazz ballad and pointed the way to cool jazz. But his recording career lasted just six years; he drank himself to death in 1931 at the age of twenty-eight. (publ.)
Note: Both Beiderbecke & his biographer, Brendan Wolfe, grew up in Davenport, Iowa.

Reviewed: Choice Sep. 2017 vol. 55 no. 1 (Highly Recommended; recommended for community college libraries)
Description: For many of us, classical music is something serious–something we study in school, something played by cultivated musicians at fancy gatherings. In Language of the Spirit, renowned music scholar Jan Swafford argues that we have it all wrong: classical music has something for everyone and is accessible to all. Ranging from Gregorian chant to Handel’s Messiah, from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons to the postmodern work of Philip Glass, Swafford is an affable and expert guide to the genre. (publ.)

Description: Robert Schumann was far ahead of his time, not least in his attitude to children and young people; his Advice for Young Musicians, originally created to accompany his famous Album for the Young, remains as relevant today as when it was written. Celebrated cellist Steven Isserlis adds his own extensive commentary to Schumann’s words of wisdom. The advice is by turns practical, humorous, and profound, making this volume a must for all aspiring musicians of all ages and standards. (publ.)

Description: Glenda Dawn Goss begins her sweeping narrative in the Fin-land of Sibelius’s youth, which remained under Russian control for the first five decades of his life. Focusing on previously unexamined events, Goss explores the composer’s formative experiences as a Russian subject and a member of the Swedish-speaking Finnish minority. She goes on to trace Sibelius's relationships with his creative contemporaries, with whom he worked to usher in a golden age of music and art that would endow Finns with a sense of pride in their heritage and encourage their hopes for the possibilities of nationhood. Skillfully evoking this artistic climate–in which Sibelius emerged as a leader–Goss creates a dazzling portrait of the painting, sculpture, literature, and music it inspired. To solve the deepest riddles of Sibelius’s life, work, and enigmatic silence, Goss contends, we must understand the awakening in which he played so great a role. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 21 Aug. 2017 p. 103 (mentioned)
Description: Examines Handel’s masterwork “Hallelujah Chorus,” and uncovers a disturbing message of anti-Judaism buried within its joyous celebration of the divinity of the Christ. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 13 July 2017 p. 40; Choice Sep 2017 vol. 55 no. 1 (Highly recommended; Recommended for community college libraries)
Description: April of 1958–the Iron Curtain was at its heaviest, and the outcome of the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition seemed pre-ordained. Nonetheless, as star musicians from across the globe descended on Moscow, an unlikely favorite emerged: Van Cliburn, a polite, lanky Texan whose passionate virtuosity captured the Russian spirit. This is the story of what unfolded that spring–for Cliburn and the other competitors, jurors, party officials, and citizens of the world who were touched by the outcome. It is a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most remarkable events in musical history, filled with political intrigue and personal struggle as artists strove for self-expression and governments jockeyed for prestige. Stuart Isacoff is a pianist, writer, and the founder of Piano Today magazine, which he edited for nearly three decades.

Reviewed: NYT/BR 21 May 2017.
Note: Graphic Novel.
Description: The biography of Ellen Cohen, “…who would grow up to become Cass Elliot – a talented and passionately determined singer with a wicked sense of style and humor, a woman who keeps her spirit despite repeated rejection she faces for a single, cruel reason: She is fat, and she doesn’t care to try to lose weight.” (NYT)

Reviewed: NPR (Deceptive Cadence Program April 20, 2017; Weekend Edition 11 July 2017); TLS 4 Aug. 2017 p. 11.
Description: Explores the unlikely bond between the famous Austrian composer and his pet starling, providing an unexpected window into human-animal friendships, music, and the nature of creative inspiration.

Description: Although Theodor W. Adorno is best known for his association with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, he began his career as a composer and successful music critic. Night Music presents the first complete English translations of two collections of texts compiled by Adorno – Moments Musicaux, containing essays written between 1928 and 1962, and Theory of New Music, a group of texts written between 1929 and 1955. … Collected in their entirety for the first time in English, the insightful texts in Night Music show the breadth of Adorno’s musical understanding and reveal an overlooked side to this significant thinker. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR
Note: Author interviewed on NPR show, Fresh Air, by host Terry Gross 20 Sept. 2016, “Sing For Your Life Recounts A Journey From Juvenile Detention To The Opera House”
Description: Story of a young black man’s journey from violence and despair to one of the world’s most elite artistic institutions. In 2011, at the age of twenty-four, Ryan Speedo Green won a nationwide competition hosted by New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Today, he is a rising star performing major roles at the Met and Europe’s most prestigious opera houses.

Reviewed: NYT 4 Dec. 2016 p. AR 17 (reference)