Book by Carner, Mosco

No other book about Leonard Cohen gets so close to the man, his city, his poems and songs, his friends, his background, and the many original influences that forged this world-famous poet, songwriter and performer. Based on the documentary film Rasky made in 1979, this book includes texts taken from the film with numerous notes and personal reminiscences from this long-standing friendship with Leonard Cohen. The Song of Leonard Cohen also includes many rare photos of Leonard Cohen and is considered to be one of the best and most intimate portraits of the subject.

Giuseppe Verdi remains the greatest operatic composer that Italy, the home of opera, has ever produced. Yet throughout his lifetime he claimed to detest composing and repeatedly rejected it. He was a landowner, a farmer, a politician and symbol of Italian independence; but his music tells a different story. An obsessive perfectionist, Verdi drove collaborators to despair but his works lauded from the start as dazzling feats of composition and characterization.

The Classic FM Friendly Guide to Beethoven will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about this famous composer, who is consistently in the top five in the Classic FM Hall of Fame (a yearly poll of the nations musical 145,000 listeners took part in 2005). Why was his childhood unhappy? How did his deafness affect him? Who were the women in his life? Who was The Immortal Beloved? What was The Heiligenstadt Testament? While giving all the facts about The Man and The Music, The Classic FM Friendly Guide to Beethoven includes lively and light-hearted features, quotes and anecdotes. There are sections about Beethovens Top 20 hits (with reference to the CD) and about his music in films, and even a Beethoven Mood Chart for when you need to raise or lower your blood pressure. Classic FM, the worlds largest classical music station (9.5 million listeners per month), have teamed up with popular TV journalist and acclaimed Beethoven expert John Suchet and publishers Hodder Arnold to publish this book, which takes its title from a new Friendly Guides on-air feature.

Chronicles the life and career of the composer and musician, focusing on his range of musical compositions, from "West Side Story" to "Kaddish."

Traces the life and music of the major composer and key figure of Romanticism, who has been the subject of major controversy since his early death in a mental asylum.

The Polish-born, British-based pianist André Tchaikowsky (1935-82) saw himself principally as a composer- one of several conflicting elements in his personality, charted by the diaries he kept between 1974 and 1982. André Tchaikowsky was only 46 when he died, internationally renowned as a pianist - and he made the headlines after his death when he left his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use in performances of Hamlet. Yet for all his facility at the keyboard Tchaikowsky's real passion was composition. The internal conflict between pianist and composer compounded an already complex character. A Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, Tchaikowsky was also a homosexual. The diaries he kept between 1974 and his death chronicle the struggles that ran through his life. Debt kept driving him back to the concert platform when his true wish was to find the time to compose. His spirited writing details the joys and vicissitudes of his life with striking candour. The diaries are introduced and annotated by Anastasia Belina-Johnson, who also provides a chronology of Tchaikowsky's life and a survey of his music. Includes a CDof the pianist in recital. Anastasia Belina-Johnson is Head of Classical Music at the Leeds College of Music.

(Amadeus). A full biography of a composer whose work extended far beyond the operettas for which he is known today.

"Captured in a beautiful package, including more than fifty color photographs, The Last Waltz tells the intriguing story of of the Viennese Strauss family known for producing some of the best known, best loved music of the nineteenth century. Johann and Josef Strauss, the Waltz Kings, composed hundreds of instantly recognizable and enduring melodies, including The Blue Danube Waltz, Tales from the Vienna Woods, Voices of Spring and The Radetzky March. Their iconic music has been featured on the scores of nearly a thousand films. Yet despite their success, this was a family riven with tension, feuds and jealousy, living in a country that was undergoing seismic upheaval. Through the personal and political chaos, the Strauss family continued to compose music to which the Viennese -- anxious to forget their troubles -- could dance and drank champagne, even as their country hurtled towards oblivion at the hands of the First World War. Classical music expert and radio host John Suchet skillfully portrays this gripping story, capturing the family dramas, the tensions, triumphs and disasters against the turbulent backdrop of Austria in the nineteenth century, from revolution to regicide." --

David Amram has played and rambled and galloped and staggered through a remarkably broad sweep of American life, experience, and creative struggle. The Boston Globe has described him as "the Renaissance man of American Music." Amram and Jack Kerouac collaborated on the first-ever jazz poetry reading in New York City in 1957 as well as the subsequent legendary film Pull My Daisy in 1959, combining Amram's music with Kerouac's narration. Amram, honored as the first Composer-in-Residence of the New York Philharmonic, has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber works, written two operas, and has collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus, Dustin Hoffman, Thelonious Monk, Willie Nelson, Nancy Griffith, Johnny Depp, and more. Vibrations is the story of one boy's adventures growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania, working odd jobs, misfitting in the U.S. Army, barnstorming through Europe with the famous Seventh Army Symphony, exiling in Paris, scuffling on the Lower East Side, day-laboring-often down but never out-finally emerging as a major musical force. With its stage-setting foreword by Douglas Brinkley and a new afterword by Kerouac biographer Audrey Sprenger, this new edition is not to be missed.

David Amram-composer, jazz artist, conductor, and world music pioneer-has been described by the Boston Globe as "the Renaissance man of American music." From early collaborations with Kerouac and Sinatra, chosen by Leonard Bernstein as the New York Philharmonic's first composer in residence, Amram's artistry has taken him from concerts with Willie Nelson to jamming with the Massai tribe of Kenya. In Upbeat: Nine Lives of a Musical Cat, Amram recounts his extraordinary adventures in the many worlds of music he calls home, all told in a rollicking anecdotal style that makes you feel that you are at home around the world. He writes, "Everywhere I have been in the world, music transcends politics. As musicians, we were able to go beyond all that and just be fellow human beings." Threading through Amram's tale of music, hard work, respect, and friendship are unforgettable stories of fellow great artists-Dizzie Gillespie, Hunter S. Thompson, Janet Gaynor, George Plimpton, Lyle Lovett, Zoe Caldwell, Willie Nelson, and many more.

"A poignant, compelling, and clear-eyed memoir of a life in music, with the dogged pursuit of composing at its center. Perhaps no art form has ever splintered into as many factions, genres, languages, philosophies, and mutually exclusive audiences as the art of music did in the mid-twentieth century. Allen Shawn's memoir fascinatingly evokes this tumultuous time, while weaving together his art and his life, hinting at their unexpected and sometimes paradoxical interconnections. Shawn grew up in an atmosphere of cultural privilege in New York City, the son of New Yorker editor William Shawn. An instinctive composing prodigy at age ten, it took him until the age of thirty to compose music he was proud of. Shawn sketches his childhood and long apprenticeship, his experiences composing for theater, dance, and concert hall, his forty years as a teacher at Bennington College, and his unexpected emergence as a writer. The book balances an account of his musical evolution, ups and downs, and life choices, offering glimpses into family life and of the many people with whom he interacted, including Leon Kirchner, Earl Kim, Nadia Boulanger, Pierre Petit, Jacques-Louis Monod, J. D. Salinger, John Updike, Benny Goodman, Louis Malle, and Vivian Fine. Along the way, Shawn offers reflections on such issues as social class, aging, loneliness, politics, and music education. In The Realm of Tones: A Composer's Memoir is a unique and touching account of one individual's internal search for self-expression and self-understanding, and of his effort to construct a life around it"--

Siegfried Kracauer’s Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time brilliantly reconfigures the biography form into a remarkable work of social and cultural history. In a book that has frequently been compared with Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Kracauer uses the life and work of Offenbach to assemble a penetrating portrayal of Second Empire Paris. By examining the superficiality and mystification of collective experience, Kracauer provides the reader with a revelatory “physiognomy” of social reality itself. Offenbach’s immensely popular operettas have long been seen as part of the larger historical amnesia and escapism in the aftermath of 1848. But Kracauer insists that Offenbach’s productions have to be understood as more than simply glittering distractions. The fantasy realms of his operettas, occurring amid the urban renewal of Baron Haussmann and the fanfare of Universal Expositions, were on the one hand fully continuous with the unreality of Napoleon III’s imperial masquerade, but on the other made a mockery of the pomp and pretenses surrounding the apparatuses of power. His music “originated in an epoch in which social reality had been banished by the Emperor’s orders, and for many years it flourished in the gap that was left.” Offenbach’s dreamworlds were embedded with a layer of utopian content that can be seen as an indictment of the fraudulence and corruption of the times. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in modern critical and cultural studies. This edition includes Kracauer’s preface to the original German edition, translated into English for the first time, and a critical foreword by Gertrud Koch.

Text: English, German (translation)

The name of Cyril Ornadel may not be known to many outside the musical theatre. The back of his head, however, was for many years the most famous on television, for Cyril Ornadel was the conductor in the orchestra pit for ITV's immensely popular programme, Sunday Night at the London Palladium. But this efficient and unassuming man was the musical director for numerous West End 'hit' shows: Kismet, Call Me Madam, Pal Joey, Wonderful Town, The King and I and My Fair Lady, to name but a few. He is also a composer in his own right. His song 'Portrait of My Love' is a standard, known and loved by an entire generation, while 'If I Ruled the World' from Pickwick, the musical he wrote with Wolf Mankowitz and Leslie Bricusse, became a world-class hit and turned into what was virtually the late Sir Harry Secombe's theme tune. Now, in this rich and illuminating memoir, Cyril Ornadel shares the fruits of his experience in almost every aspect of the music business - theatre, films, recording, composing, orchestrating, conducting, producing. With wit, wisdom and humility he candidly discusses the triumphs and disasters of his lifelong love affair with Show Business.

Although A.B. Marx is not often acknowledged as such, he remains Western music's single most influential theorist, as the person who gave Sonata Form its name and codified its elements. Above a certain level of proficiency, there is not a single musician in the Western Classical tradition who does not know Sonata Form: they know Marx's legacy, if not his name. Further awareness of Marx as a man is especially important. The naming of Sonata form, and the discussion of its elements, was invested with convictions about music that Marx was among the very first to hold, and which we continue to value: for instance, that a composer's formal choices are not made just by convention, but with intention, and that the way in which a work unfolds is itself meaningful; or that music of any era reflects the aesthetic priorities of its age. Those convictions, in turn, spring from Marx's vigorous intellectual engagement with the world around him, its thinkers, its writers, and its politics. This translation provides a unique opportunity to read Marx in his own words. His Recollections from My Life were published in 1865, Marx's last book to appear during his lifetime, and have not been republished either in the German original, nor in any translation. Our translation with annotation and commentary will make available to English-readers this important view of music in Germany during the time of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and other familiar names from the concert hall.

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