Johann Sebastian Bach's "Notebook for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach" is a collection of keyboard music Bach began compiling in around 1720. Most of the pieces included are better known as parts of the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Inventions and Sinfonias. The authorship of some of the other works in the collection is debated. The comb binding creates a lay-flat book that is perfect for study and performance. 62 Selections, 123 pages.

This classic study of jazz by renowned composer, conductor, and musical scholar Gunther Schuller was widely acclaimed on its first publication in 1968. The first of two volumes on the history and musical contribution of jazz, it takes us from the beginnings of jazz as a distinct musical style at the turn of the century to its first great flowering in the 1930's. Schuller explores the music of the great jazz soloists of the twenties--Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and others--and the big bands and arrangers--Fletcher Henderson, Bennie Moten, and especially Duke Ellington--placing their music in the context of the other musical cultures and languages of the 20th century and offering original analyses of many great jazz recordings. Now reissued in paper, Early Jazz provides a musical tour of the early American jazz world for a new generation of scholars, students, and jazz fans.

A celebration of the language and primal essence of rock'n'roll provides a fascinating history of a turbulent era, from the rise of Bill Haley to the death of Jimi Hendrix, that dispels rumors, tells scandalous stories, and details the music. Reprint.

Explains how to develop an appreciation for opera by furnishing a concise history of opera, a glossary of terms, a list of books and recordings, a listener's guide to key operatic works, and advice on attending a performance

Norway's Ole Bull led one of the most remarkable and celebrated lives of the nineteenth century. Colorful and charismatic, he was a composer and virtuoso violinist who won acclaim from Moscow to Cairo and from Canada to Cuba, associated with the cultural elite of his day, and promoted himself and the culture of Norway with a flair that rivaled P.T. Barnum's. A child prodigy, Bull was admitted to the Bergen orchestra as first violin at the age of eight. He soon was playing to admiring audiences across Europe and in North America, idolized on both sides of the Atlantic for his superb technical skill in improvisation and his ability to play the violin polyphonically. His success was marked by controversy, however. Though he was hailed as "the Paganini of the North," some critics labeled him a charlatan for his seemingly magic tricks on the violin. Ole Bull counted among his friends and admirers many of the great names of his era: Schumann and Liszt, Emerson and Wagner. Longfellow found in Bull a model for the musician in his Tales of a Wayside Inn. Hans Christian Andersen portrayed Bull as a veritable fairy prince in his "Episode of Ole Bull's Life," a characterization that in part inspired Ibsen's Peer Gynt Although he spent most of his adult life abroad, Bull's love for and pride in his native land were always manifest. He was a staunch Norwegian nationalist, a tireless promoter of its native art and culture. Some of the concert improvisations for which he was celebrated were rooted in his native slatter (folkdance tunes). He modified his own instrument, flattening the bridge and making the bow longer and heavier, using the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle as a model. By mid-century, Bull was able to realize his dream of establishing a national theater in Bergen. He gave Henrik Ibsen a start in theater management, employed the poet Bjornstjerne Bjornson, and promoted the music of Edvard Grieg. His attempt to establish a Norwegian colony in the United States, however, was unsuccessful. "Oleana," for which Bull purchased a land grant in Pennsylvania, failed in little more than a year because of his ineptitude in selecting land and managing financial enterprises. He made his home base, finally, in Norway, buying an island south of Bergen where he built for himself a fantastic palace of music. He never retired from the concert stage. Indeed, he performed in Chicago just three months before his death in 1880. The words of the poet Aasmund Vinje, "That surely would be a man to write a book about," have been taken to heart by authors Einar Haugen and his daughter Camilla Cai. In addition to giving life once again to a fascinating and flamboyant figure, this biography provides the first comprehensive listing of Bull's works (with full descriptions of all known sources), analyses of his compositions and their influences, and reviews of his performances.

Follows a single lock of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven, from the great composer's deathbed in 1827, through its role as a relic in the Hiller family, into the hands of a doctor in Nazi-occupied Denmark, to its 1994 sale at Sotheby's, and describes the scientific research done on the hair to uncover information about Beethoven's life. Reprint.

Mozart's beloved comic romp, reprinted from a late (C. F. Peters, 1941) edition, which preserves Mozart's autograph manuscript and early translations of the libretto and includes passages that are often cut in other editions.

Don Giovanni is presented here in the C. F. Peters edition and contains the original version, along with later arias, recitatives, and duets added for the Vienna performance. Text in both Italian and German.

This timeless collection contains selections attributed to J.S. Bach, his son C.P.E. Bach, and others. Generations of students have studied the volume's "Menuet in G Major," "Musette in D Major" and the "Prelude in C Major" from the first volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Dr. Palmer provides the texts to the instrumental settings of chorales and arias found in this work, as well as a brief biography of the Bach family.

Explores the relationship between African-American popular music and American culture through a review of artists' music from the pre-Civil Rights Movement era through today's "gangsta" rap. Original. 15,000 first printing.