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Women are an essential part of the history of the piano--but how many women pianists can you name?   Throughout most of the piano's history, women pianists lacked access to formal training and were excluded from male-dominated performance spaces. Even the modern...

The emotional, epic story of James "Cornbread" Harris--a self-proclaimed "blessed dude" and one of Minneapolis's most influential musicians From the heart of the Minnesota blues comes the story of James "Cornbread" Harris Jr., the songwriter, pianist, and...

The product of a hardscrabble childhood, J. Mayo "Ink" Williams parlayed an Ivy League education into unlikely twin careers as a foundational producer of Black music and pioneering Black player in the early NFL. Clifford R. Murphy tells the story of an ambitious, upwardly mobile life affected,...

Drawing on a range of sources and fields, the rich life story of this polymathic composer.   This groundbreaking biography offers fresh perspectives on the life, ideas, and music of French twentieth-century composer, organist, and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen....

One of the most innovative composers of his generation, Mikel Rouse is known for a trilogy of operas that includes Dennis Cleveland and a gift for superimposing pop vernaculars onto avant-garde music. This memoir channels Rouse's high energy personality into an exuberant account of the...

One of the late twentieth century's most celebrated and influential public intellectuals, Edward W. Said was also a critic of astonishing range. This book presents his insightful and elegant analyses of four major operas--originally delivered as the Empson Lectures at Cambridge University in 1997-...

I am a composer. A composer of classical music. Quite honestly I am not quite sure how that happened to a girl born in Belize and brought up in Tottenham . . . It is clear that composing found me. It crept up on me and wouldn't let me out of its grasp. Now a leading...

Just Kids for the grunge era. Seattle band, The Gits and their charismatic front person Mia Zapata were on the verge of international rock stardom but on  July 7, 1993, days before their third US tour, Mia Zapata, The Gits 27-year-old singer-songwriter, was brutally assaulted and...

Pioneering the field of Springsteen scholarship when it first appeared in 1997, Born in the U.S.A. remains one of the definitive studies of Springsteen's work and its impact on American culture. Moving beyond journalistic and biographical approaches, Jim Cullen situates the...

The conception, creation, recording, and significance of the Beatles' "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" John Lennon wrote "Strawberry Fields Forever" in Almería, Spain, in fall 1966, and in November, in response to that song, Paul McCartney wrote "Penny Lane" at his home...

Singing the Land: Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America examines the proliferation and use of popular Hebrew Zionist music amongst American Jewry during the first half of the twentieth century. This music--one part in a greater process of instilling diasporic Zionism in American...

Lessons in Gratitude tells the story of Aaron Dworkin, a MacArthur Fellow, social entrepreneur, and spoken word artist who has dedicated his life's work to changing the face of classical arts in the world. The themes of persistence, passion, and loyalty shine through stories of an unhappy...

Music education today requires an approach rooted in care and kindness that coexists alongside the dismantling of systems that fail to serve our communities in higher education. But, as the essayists in Sound Pedagogy show, the structural aspects of music study in higher education present...