"Ours is music with built-in hatred" – Pete Townshend This book is a biography of the Who unlike any other. From their inception as the Detours in the mid-sixties, to the late seventies, post-Quadrophenia, the Who are pictured through the prism of...

The electric guitar is an exceptional object. Its sound is heard every day by hundreds of millions of people. Yet this beloved instrument started as an experimental project, hand-built by lone inventors and warily regarded by audience and players ali...

This book is the first to explore the popularity and novelty of the guitar in Georgian England, noting its impact on the social, cultural, and musical history of the period. The instrument possessed an imagery as rich as its uses were varied; it emer...

Everywhere you look, musicians are creating, recording, and selling their music without the help of big-name studios, producers, or labels. This book offers tangible – and visually stunning – proof that self-recording is a path to artistic freedom. E...

Robert Philip, scholar, broadcaster, and musician, has compiled an essential handbook for lovers of classical music, designed to enhance their listening experience to the full. Covering four hundred works by sixty-eight composers from Corelli to Shos...

The first performance of Handel's Messiah in Dublin in 1742 is now legendary. Gentlemen were asked to leave their swords at home and ladies to come without hoops in their skirts in order to fit more people into the audience. Why then, did this now fa...

"Pynchon's Sound of Music" is dedicated to cataloging, exploring, and interpreting the manifold manifestations of music in Thomas Pynchon's work. An original mix of close and distant readings, this monograph employs a variety of disciplines – from li...

"Both from the Ears and Mind" offers a bold new understanding of the intellectual and cultural position of music in Tudor and Stuart England. Linda Phyllis Austern brings to life the kinds of educated writings and debates that surrounded musical perf...

Francis Poulenc is a key figure in twentieth-century classical music, as well as an unorthodox and striking individual. Roger Nichols draws upon Poulenc's music and other primary sources to write an authoritative life of this great artist. Although...