This groundbreaking book argues that health and medical media, with their unique goals and production values, constitute a rich cultural and historical archive and deserve greater scholarly attention. Original essays by leading media scholars and hi…
Balint Andras Varga is perhaps the world's most respected interviewer of living composers. For The Courage of Composers and the Tyranny of Taste: Reflections on New Music, Varga has confronted thirty-three composers with quotations carefully chosen…
This book is a new edition of the most comprehensive life-and-works study of the great Baroque-era organist and composer Dieterich Buxtehude (ca. 1637-1707), released to celebrate the tercentenary of the composer's death. Originally published in 198…
Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu left an enduring legacy of forgiveness, openness, and solidarity in South Africa. This book looks at how the country's historic transition to democracy has not only changed the negative narrative about South Africa bu…
Composer-performer Julius Eastman (1940-90) was an enigma, both comfortable and uncomfortable in the many worlds he inhabited: black, white, gay, straight, classical music, disco, academia, and downtown New York. His music, insistent and straightfor…
Today China is a major player in advancing the frontiers of biomedicine, yet previous accounts have examined only whether medical ideas and institutions created in the West were successfully transferred to China. This is the first book to demonstrat…
Alexis de Tocqueville famously identified the problem of democracy as the "tyranny of the majority," where the rule of the majority oppresses or marginalizes minorities and individuals. John Stuart Mill, perhaps more than any other liberal thinker,…
Gyoergy Kurtag (b. 1926) is widely regarded as one of the foremost composers in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. Born in Romania, he received crucial training in Paris from Olivier Messiaen and Marianne Stein. He…
One of the most influential and beloved American composers, Aaron Copland played a critical role in shaping what is often recognized as the "American sound." He is best known for achieving this through his works for the concert hall and ballet. Yet…
The debate over modernist music has continued for almost a century: from Strauss's Elektra and Webern's Symphony Op.21 to John Cage's renegotiation of musical control, the unusual musical practices of the Velvet Underground, and Stanley Kubrick's us…
Francois Lesure's "critical biography" of Claude Debussy (Fayard, 2003) is widely recognized by scholars as the most comprehensive and reliable account of that composer's life and career as well as of the artistic milieu in which he worked. This enc…
The American-born Winnaretta Singer (1865-1943) was a millionaire at the age of eighteen, due to her inheriting a substantial part of the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. Her 1893 marriage to Prince Edmond de Polignac, an amateur composer, brought her…
In the beginning there was noise. Drumming, the world's most ancient instrumental tradition, re-emerged explosively in the concert music of the twentieth century as music for percussion, involving drums and many other kinds of noisemakers. The music…
Nicolae Margineanu's journey started in 1905 in the village of Obreja in Transylvania and ended in 1980 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He began his life under Austro-Hungarian rule, was witness to the 1918 Union, lived under three kings (Ferdinand, Carol…
This collection of essays places the Balkans at the center of European developments, not as a conflict-ridden problem zone, but rather as a full-fledged European region. Contrary to the commonly held perception, contributors to the volume argue, the…
Two volume set: Modern composers as diverse as Bela Bartok, Maurice Ravel, Benjamin Britten, and John Cage have confided some of their most personal and intense thoughts to the medium of the string quartet. The resulting repertoire has won the alleg…
Studies on Augustine have burgeoned over the past decade, but attention has focused primarily on his writings on philosophy and theology. Less attention has been given to his political teaching, despite his well-known and influential statements on p…
In the annals of music history, few figures have dominated the discussion of virtuosity as much as Franz Liszt. A flamboyant performer whose hair-raising technical feats at the piano created a sense of awe-inspiring excitement and an icon whose star…
In 1959, King Kong, an interracial jazz opera, swept across South Africa and became a countrywide phenomenon. Its performances sold out, its LP record was widely heard, and its cast became recognized celebrities. Featuring an African composer, cast,…
The eighteenth century was a golden age of adaptation: classical epics were adapted to contemporaneous mock-epics, life writing to novels, novels to plays, and unauthorized sequels abounded. In our own time, cultural products of the long eighteenth…
Against the backdrop of the Progressive Era, World War I, and the 1920s, sex education burgeoned in the United States through institutions like the YMCA, the popular press, girls' schools, and the US military. As access to sexual knowledge increased…
Kyiv as Regime City charts the resettlement of the Ukrainian capital after Nazi occupation, focusing on the efforts of returning Soviet rulers to regain legitimacy within a Moscow-centered regime still attending to the war front. Beginning with the…
The 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union ("Operation Barbarossa") significantly altered the lives of the civilians in occupied Russian territories, yet these individuals' stories are overlooked by most scholarly treatments of the attack and its…
Desire-Emile Inghelbrecht was a conductor and composer. His friendship with Claude Debussy began in 1911 (although they had met previously), and he soon became one of the Master's closest friends. This book is the first publication, in the original…
A multidisciplinary group of prominent scholars investigates the historical relationship between sexually transmitted infections and infertility. Untreated gonorrhea and chlamydia cause infertility in a proportion of women and men. Unlike the much-f…
America possesses more autograph manuscripts and other primary Bach sources than any other country outside Germany. Dispersed in 30 different places are at least nineteen autograph manuscripts, fifty-five original performing parts and other autograp…
The essays in this volume, by one of America's leading authorities on Bach and Mozart, serve a single objective: to promote a deeper understanding of those two great composers both as supremely gifted creators and as human beings. Author Robert L. M…
Over the last several decades, historians have conducted extensive research into contact between the United States and West Africa during the era of the transatlantic trade. Yet we still understand relatively little about more recent relations betwe…
"Let the Church Sing!": Music and Worship in a Black Mississippi Community is based on years of fieldwork by an Irish ethnomusicologist, who examines, in more detail than ever before, how various facets of the Clear Creek citizens' worldview find ex…
Drawing upon a myriad of primary and secondary historical sources, The Royal Doctors: Medical Personnel at the Tudor and Stuart Courts investigates the influential individuals who attended England's most important patients during a pivotal epoch in…
The dramatic story of tuberculosis is told here in a straightforward and accessible style. It presents the stories of persons connected with the disease, either as victims, or as those who made contributions to our knowledge of it; in addition to th…
This book is a philosophical tour through the experience of beauty: what it is, and how the composer, performer, and listener all contribute. It explores -- with insight, patience, and humor -- profound issues at the essence of our experience. A stu…
The unique sounds of the biwa, shamisen, and other traditional instruments from Japan are heard more and more often in works for the concert hall and opera house. Composing for Japanese Instruments is a practical orchestration and instrumentation ma…
Representing Bushmen draws on the work of Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, and Martin Bernal to show how the study of language was integral to the formation of racial discrimination in South Africa. Author Shane Moran demonstrates the central role of l…
Anton Heiller is one of the twentieth century's most renowned and influential organists. Born in 1923, Heiller was trained in Vienna and rose to prominence quickly, giving his first solo recital at the age of twenty-two. Before concentrating on the…
Ira Aldridge: The Early Years, 1807-1833 chronicles the rise of one of the modern world's first black classical actors, as he ascended from an impoverished childhood in New York City to a career as a celebrated thespian on the British stage. After a…
This collection of essays addresses, in specific historical ways and from particular disciplinary standpoints, the problem of knowledge and what used to be called the classification of the sciences. What is, or what passes for, knowledge? What are i…
Early American women composers are barely represented in standard reference works, yet their output constitutes a significant proportion of the bound sheet music in the collections in the New York Public Library, Yale University, Boston Public Libra…
Brahms and the Shaping of Time brings together essays by leading music scholars, each of which analyzes the music of Brahms with a particular focus on the music's temporality. The volume reveals numerous ways in which Brahms manipulates such basic e…
This volume explores the intersection of cities and the natural environment in an array of urban places, including New York, London, New Orleans, Venice, and Seattle, across a broad period from the late Renaissance to the present. The essays investi…
George Rochberg, American Composer, is the first comprehensive study devoted to tracing and putting into a rich cultural context the career of George Rochberg, widely acknowledged as one of the most prominent musical postmodernists. Drawing from unp…
In recent years, a multicultural society and changing conceptions of French identity have been the source of considerable debate in scholarship, literature and the media in France. This book examines equally contested definitions of French identity…
Medieval Liege was the seat of a vast diocese in northwestern Europe and a city of an exceptional number of churches, clergymen, and church musicians. Recognized as a priestly paradise, the city accommodated as many Masses each day as Rome. In this…
In this volume, Harold Meek, former first horn of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, shares anecdotes and insights about the joys and travails of playing under Klemperer, Koussevitzky, Munch, and others. He also brings together some important informatio…
This book focuses on the modern cultures of Africa, from the consequences of the imposition of Western rule to the current struggles to define national identities in the context of neo-liberal economic policies and globalization. The book argues tha…
This history explores the exceptionally complex scientific and medical techniques and practices that have allowed practitioners to claim expertise in the brain and mind sciences over the past two centuries. Based on meticulous historical studies, es…
In this stirring collection of essays, author Nancy Bolger leads the reader through the extraordinary life of Robert J. Joynt, MD, PhD, one of the most influential neurologists of the last half century. The story begins on the small-town streets of…
This book is a practical manual for anyone who stands on a podium helping an ensemble make music. The four main chapters address the major obligations of the conductor: (1) bringing the musical tones to life in the most beautiful, most moving way po…
By upbringing, family connections, and education, Felix Mendelssohn was ideally positioned to contribute to the historical legacies of the German people, who in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars discovered that they were a nation with a distinct…
European public health was a playing field for deeply contradictory impulses throughout the twentieth century. In the 1920s, international agencies were established with great fanfare and postwar optimism to serve as the watchtower of health the wor…
