Monk's Music

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Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making (Roth Family Foundation Music in America Imprint)

by Gabriel Solis

Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) was one of jazz's greatest and most enigmatic figures. As a composer, pianist, and bandleader, Monk both extended the piano tradition known as Harlem stride and was at the center of modern jazz's creation during the 1940s, setting the stage for the experimentalism of the 1960s and '70s. This pathbreaking study combines cultural theory, biography, and musical analysis to shed new light on Monk's music and on the jazz canon itself. Gabriel Solis shows how the work of this stubbornly nonconformist composer emerged from the jazz world's fringes to find a central place in its canon. Solis reaches well beyond the usual life-and-times biography to address larger issues in jazz scholarship--ethnography and the role of memory in history's construction. He considers how Monk's stature has grown, from the narrowly focused wing of the avant-garde in the 1960s and '70s to the present, where he is claimed as an influence by musicians of all kinds. He looks at the ways musical lineages are created in the jazz world and, in the process, addresses the question of how musicians use performance itself to maintain, interpret, and debate the history of the musical tradition we call jazz.

Artists in Exile

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Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts

by Joseph Horowitz

Decades of war and revolution in Europe forced an "intellectual migration" during the last century, relocating thousands of artists and thinkers to the United States. For many of Europe's premier performing artists, America proved to be a destination both strange and opportune.
Featuring the stories of George Balanchine, Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and many others, Artists in Exile explores the impact that these famous newcomers had on American culture, and that America had on them.

World Press Encyclopedia

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World Press Encyclopedia: A Survey of Press Systems Worldwide ( TWO VOL. SET )

by Amanda C. Quick

Twenty-one years after publication of the first edition, this completely revised work contains articles on the press and media in 232 countries and territories. Arranged alphabetically by country, entries generally cover the history of the Fourth Estate, press laws, economic framework, censorship, attitudes toward foreign media, a chronology of significant recent events, and a bibliography. Several entries are illustrated with black-and-white graphs depicting Internet use, top-circulation newspapers, and the number of personal computers; basic country data are also included. Three appendixes provide comparative statistical rankings (newspaper circulation, television stations, radio sets, etc.); annotated listing of news associations and organizations; and a collection of regional maps. A unified author-subject index provides easy access to the contents of both volumes.Compiled by 80 contributors, the individual essays vary greatly in quality and length (200-30,000 words). For some smaller and less developed nations, such as Belize and Benin, the essays are quite short. Essays for countries where the press is strictly regulated, such as Cambodia, can also be skimpy. Two additional appendixes would have been helpful: a listing of the Web sites for major newspapers and a general bibliography listing guides, directories, and handbooks to the world press.World Press Encyclopedia is an excellent reference source providing concise information for material currently dispersed in numerous print and Web sources. Especially valuable is the bibliography at the end of each entry. The Ghana essay, for example, cites a wide variety of sources from American media publications to Ghanaian newspapers. Useful for students, scholars, and those seeking quick information, this unique source is recommended for public and academic libraries.

Semiotics: The Basics

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Semiotics: The Basics

by Dani Chandler

This up-dated second edition provides a clear and concise introduction to the key concepts of semiotics in accessible and jargon-free language. With a revised introduction and glossary, extended index and suggestions for further reading, this new edition provides an increased number of examples including computer and mobile phone technology, television commercials and the web.
Demystifying what is a complex, highly interdisciplinary field, key questions covered include:
What is a sign?
Which codes do we take for granted?
How can semiotics be used in textual analysis?
What is a text?
A highly useful, must-have resource, Semiotics: The Basics is the ideal introductory text for those studying this growing area.

Contesting the Logic of Painting

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Contesting the Logic of Painting (Visualising the Middle Ages) [ILLUSTRATED]

by C.E. Barber

Drawing on a range of philosophical and theological writings produced in eleventh-century Byzantium, this book offers a reading of the icon and Byzantine aesthetics that not only expands our understanding of these topics but challenges our assumptions about the work of art itself.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

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Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

by Marshall McLuhan

with a new introduction by Lewis H. Lapham This reissue of Understanding Media marks the thirtieth anniversary (1964-1994) of Marshall McLuhan's classic expose on the state of the then emerging phenomenon of mass media. Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate. There has been a notable resurgence of interest in McLuhan's work in the last few years, fueled by the recent and continuing conjunctions between the cable companies and the regional phone companies, the appearance of magazines such as WiRed, and the development of new media models and information ecologies, many of which were spawned from MIT's Media Lab. In effect, media now begs to be redefined. In a new introduction to this edition of Understanding Media, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham reevaluates McLuhan's work in the light of the technological as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in the last part of this century.

Mimesis and Its Romantic Reflections

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Mimesis and Its Romantic Reflections

by Frederick Burwick

In this study, Frederick Burwick probes the origins - philosophical, aesthetic and literary - of developing subjectivist mimesis in the literature and theory of the Romantic period. He draws on the theories of Aristotle, Kant, Schiller, Thomas De Quincey, and others.