Have you ever wondered: How it feels to be eponymous? Why some German pigeons were painted blue in the First World War? What connects Rachmaninoff to Chief Sitting Bull? It is 1972. Bernard Robins is in London – American, innocent, uninformed and arrogant – to make his name and fortune as a pianist, composer and conductor. He lives at the Kensington Music Society, a haven for aspiring musicians, including afro-headed violinists, cellists in caftans and coloraturas from Colorado. During his time there, Bernard accidentally encounters his long lost great-uncle, Hermann Heinrich Zweck, a nonagenarian – a once eminent, now forgotten composer, who has known most of the great musical figures of the Twentieth Century and hated almost all of them. Zweck is engaged in a war against stupidity, laziness and cowardice with the entire world, and especially with Bernard and Charles Forsythe – a hapless English musicologist whose only crime, (grievous in Zweck's view) is to be both English and an academic. The romantic relationships the three principals have with strong women, ranging from promiscuity to endless love, change the lives of all concerned. Throughout the novel, Zweck engages in a battle of words with the author in a series of interruptions and monologues. Comically written by an author skilled in both writing and music, Zweck is an accessible and hilarious novel about fame, identity, music and dumplings.

The Art of Youth is a moving inquiry into the nature of artistic prodigies who did their major work at an early age. Renowned novelist Nicholas Delbanco gives us a triptych of indelible portraits: the American writer Stephen Crane (immortalized by The Red Badge of Courage ); British artist Dora Carrington (called "the most neglected serious painter of her time"); and the legendary composer George Gershwin ( Rhapsody in Blue , Porgy and Bess ). All three lived colorful, productive lives before dying early, at an average age of thirty-five. In this learned and elegant book, Delbanco discovers what it is we mourn in authors who pass away so young, and muses on his own life--one marked by both early success and longevity.

(Vocal Selections). As one of Hollywood's most memorable films, and perhaps the greatest screen adaptation of a novel ever, the 1939 The Wizard of Oz brought the words to music, entrenching the songs in popular culture and ensuring their timelessness. With this piano/vocal/guitar songbook, you can play every song from the classic movie, including: Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead * If I Only Had a Brain * Lullaby League/Lollip Guild/We Welcome You to Munchkinland * Over the Rainbow * and more.

(Music Sales America). Suite of five pieces for brass quintet: two trumpets, horn, trombone and tuba. Full Score. This work was composed in 1964 at the request of the well known American tuba player Roger Bobo. It was soon taken into the repertoire of the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble, who gave the first BBC broadcast. The first recording was on Pye records, by the Halle Brass Ensemble. Since then it has become a regular repertoire piece and recorded as well as broadcast all over the world. The Suite consists of five movements, all illustrating aspects of the Burlesque Theatre, Music Hall, circus and cabaret, so popular at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th. The titles of the short movements are: Soubrette Song, Trick Cyclists, Adagio Team, Soft Shoe Shuffle and Les Girls. The five orchestral brass instruments (two trumpets, horn, trombone and tuba) are exploited in a chamber music manner, but the cumulative effect has a theatrical quality in keeping with the title.

"A way to live" is a black comedy about revenge when there's nothing more to lose. "Where there's a Will" is a film about a struggling country jazz band that receives a helping hand from long dead musicians. "The third player" tells the tale of an Australian country football team which discovers a novel way to improve their performance.

FROM THE POET the Chicago Tribune calls the new voice of Chicago, comes L-vis Lives!, a bold new collection of poetry and prose exploring the collision of race, art, and appropriation in American culture. L-vis is an imagined persona, a representation of artists who have used and misused Black music. Like so many others who gained fame and fortune from their sampling, L-vis is as much a sincere artist as he is a thief. In Kevin Coval's poems, L-vis' story is equal parts forgotten history, autobiography, and re-imaginings. We see shades of Elvis Presley, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem, and meet some of history's more obscure whiteboy heroes and anti-heroes: legendary breakdancers, political activists, and music impresarios. A story of both artistic theft and radical invention, L-vis Lives! is a poetic novella on all of the possibilities and problems of post-racial" American culture-where Black art is still at times only fully accepted in a white face, and every once in a while an L-vis" comes along to step in to the void. i am a hero to most. the great hope of something other. a complex back-story. something other than the business of my father. Bland's antonym. jim crow's black sheep. the forgotten son left to rise in the darkness among the dis carded in the wild of working class, single mother hoods. a hero who transcends who translates the dis satisfactions of the plains; kids of kurt cobain, method man amphetamine, the odd Iowan who digs dirt and lights beyond the pig yard, spits nebraskan argot, hero to the heart land, middle brow(n) america "--