Music: Books

In this volume, Nicholas Tawa concludes that they succeeded, at the very least, in producing music that belongs in the cultural memory of every American.

The Musician's Handbook has been thoroughly revised and updated with new interviews with music-business leaders, new pricing and legal structures for the digital age, new how-to tips for independent and do-it-yourself musicians.

Essays, articles, and recollections about the music and musicians with roots in the Carolinas.

A book about understaning music.

This text is designed to help music students become familiar with and use the many research tools available to them.

This book concentrates on the effective listening skills needed to identify composers and to recognize their styles and some of their representative works.

An exploration into the question of greatness from the Chief Classical Music Critic of the New York Times. When he began to listen to the great works of classical music as a child, Anthony Tommasini had many questions. Why did a particular piece move him? How did the music work? Over time, he realized that his passion for this music was not enough. He needed to understand it.

Scientist and musician John Powell dives deep into decades of psychological and sociological studies in order to answer the question "Why does music affect us so profoundly?"

This book is a love letter to the artists, scenes, and sounds defining North Carolina's extraordinary contributions to American popular music. David Menconi spent three decades immersed in the state's music, where traditions run deep but the energy expands in countless directions. Menconi shows how working-class roots and rebellion tie North Carolina's Piedmont blues, jazz, and bluegrass to beach music, rock, hip-hop, and more. From mill towns and mountain coves to college-town clubs and the stage of American Idol, Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk, Step It Up and Go celebrates homegrown music just as essential to the state as barbecue and basketball.

In Songbooks, critic and scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded. Drawing on his background editing the Village Voice music section, coediting the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and organizing the Pop Conference, Weisbard connects American music writing from memoirs, biographies, and song compilations to blues novels, magazine essays, and academic studies.