Music : Instruction & Study

Learn to play the guitar using this quick and easy guide. Whether you dream of playing classical guitar, a B.B. King lick, or just the opening bars to 'Stairway to Heaven,' this book can get you there. This easy-to-use guide introduces the beginning guitarist to all styles of playing, from classical to jazz and pop. Using basic exercises and a selection of popular tunes, it shows how to do everything from reading tablature and chord diagrams to performing simple accompaniment. This book is designed for the child or adult beginner who wants a 'user-friendly' introduction to the most popular musical instrument. It contains numerous sidebars and illustrations, making learning the guitar fun and easy. more...

Price: $21.95

Is music a language of the emotions? How do recorded pop songs differ from works created for live performance? Is John Cage's silent piece, 4'33", music? Stephen Davies's new book collects some of his most important papers on central topics in the philosophy of music. As well as perennial questions, Davies addresses contemporary controversies, including the impact of modern technology on the presentation and reception of both new and old musical works. These essays, two of. them new and previously unpublished, are self-standing but thematically connected, and will be of great interest to philosophers, aestheticians, and to theorists of music and art. - ;Representing Stephen Davies's best shorter writings, these essays outline developments within the philosophy of music over the last two decades, and summarize the state of play at the beginning of a new century. Including two new and previously unpublished pieces, they address both perennial questions and contemporary controversies, such as that over the 'authentic performance' movement, and the impact of modern technology on the presentation and reception of musical works. Rather. than attempting to reduce musical works to a single type, Davies recognizes a great variety of kinds, and a complementary range of possibilities for their rendition. Among the questions that Davies considers are these: How can expressiveness be in a musical work when music experiences nothing? Is music a language of the emotions? How do recorded pop songs and purely electronic pieces differ from works created for live performance? Is John Cage's silent piece, 4'33", music? To what extent is the performer free to create her own interpretation and to what extent is she constrained by the composer's score? Is training in musical technicalities a. prerequisite for a full appreciation of musical works and performances? Is an awareness of the socio-historical setting in which a work is created releva more...

Price: $47.25

This book brings together the professional experiences of eminent analytical music therapists from Europe and the USA. The book examines the origins and theory of AMT (including a contribution on the subject from Mary Priestley), before exploring its uses in various contexts. Chapters cover AMT in counselling and rehabilitation, with adults and children and with nonverbal clients. A concluding section discusses aspects of the training of music therapy students. Written by experienced and highly regarded analytic music therapists, and edited by Johannes Th. Eschen, one of the first ever AMT students, this book will be of interest to practitioners in many branches of music therapy and related disciplines. more...

Price: $36.95

Peter Kivy presents a fascinating critical examination of the two rival ways of understanding instrumental music. He argues against 'literary' interpretation in terms of representational or narrative content, and defends musical formalism. Along the way he discusses interpretations of a range of works in the canon of absolute music. - ;Antithetical Arts constitutes a defence of musical formalism against those who would put literary interpretations on the absolute music canon. In Part I, the historical origins of both the literary interpretation of absolute music and musical formalism are laid out. In Part II, specific attempts to put literary interpretations on various works of the absolute music canon are examined and criticized. Finally, in Part III, the question is raised as to what the human. significance of absolute music is, if it does not lie in its representational or narrative content. The answer is that, as yet, philosophy has no answer, and that the question should be considered an important one for philosophers of art to consider, and to try to answer without appeal to representational or. narrative content. - more...

Price: $65.71

All normal human beings alive in the last fifty thousand years appear to have possessed, in Mark Turner's phrase, "irrepressibly artful minds." Cognitively modern minds produced a staggering list of behavioral singularities--science, religion, mathematics, language, advanced tool use, decorative dress, dance, culture, art--that seems to indicate a mysterious and unexplained discontinuity between us and all other living things. This brute fact gives rise to some tantalizing questions: How did the artful mind emerge? What are the basic mental operations that make art possible for us now, and how do they operate? These are the questions that occupy the distinguished contributors to this volume, which emerged from a year-long Getty-funded research project hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. These scholars bring to bear a range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives on the relationship between art (broadly conceived), the mind, and the brain. Together they hope to provide directions for a new field of research that can play a significant role in answering the great riddle of human singularity. more...

Price: $47.25