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After a hundred years of recording, the process of making records is still mysterious to most people who listen to them. Records hold a fundamental place in the dynamics of modern musical life, but what do they represent? Are they documents? Snapshots? Artworks? Fetishes? Commodities? Conveniences? The Poetics of Rock is a fascinating exploration of recording consciousness and compositional process from the perspective of those who make records. In it, Albin Zak examines the crucial roles played by recording technologies in the construction of rock music and shows how songwriters, musicians, engineers, and producers contribute to the creative project, and how they all leave their mark on the...
This title provides a fascinating exploration of recording consciousness and compositional process from the perspective of those who make records.
An introductory textbook for Rock Music Appreciation and History courses, Rock on Record traces the story of rock from the late 1940s through the pre-rock styles of the 1950s to rock in its heyday in the 1960s and, then follows its continued growth in the 1970s and early 1980s. Rock on Record puts listening first, teaching students how to listen to key recordings in the rock repertoire. The book opens with general guidance on how to listen to a recording as well as an overview of the song structures commonly used by rock songwriters. Then, in twenty-two chronological sections, Albin J. Zak provides historical context for each new genre or style, discussing its key recordings and performers and its impact on the artists who followed. Zak analyzes seventy-three recordings using easy-to-follow listening guides, giving students the tools they will need to enhance their enjoyment and understanding while also highlighting a wide range of examples that illustrate the richness of the rock repertory. Rock on Record examines how rock changed American culture and encourages students to explore further on their own.
A definitive study of the most important decade in post-World War II popular music history
This magnificent survey of the most popular period in music history is an extended essay embracing music, aesthetics, social history, and politics, by one of the keenest minds writing on music in the world today. Dahlhaus organizes his book around "watershed" years--for example, 1830, the year of the July Revolution in France, and around which coalesce the "demise of the age of art" proclaimed by Heine, the musical consequences of the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert, the simultaneous and dramatic appearance of Chopin and Liszt, Berlioz and Meyerbeer, and Schumann and Mendelssohn. But he keeps us constantly on guard against generalization and clich . Cherished concepts like Romanticism, trad...
Given the phenomenal fame and commercial success that the Beatles knew for the entire course of their familiar career, their music per se has received surprisingly little detailed attention. Not all of their cultural influence can be traced to long hair and flashy clothing; the Beatles had numerous fresh ideas about melody, harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, form, colors, and textures. Or consider how much new ground was broken by their lyrics alone--both the themes and imagery of the Beatles' poetry are key parts of what made (and still makes) this group so important, so popular, and so imitated. This book is a comprehensive chronological study of every aspect of the Fab Four's musical life--including full examinations of composition, performance practice, recording, and historical context--during their transcendent late period (1966-1970). Rich, authoritative interpretations are interwoven through a documentary study of many thousands of audio, print, and other sources.
Leonard Meyer proposes a theory of style and style change that relates the choices made by composers to the constraints of psychology, cultural context, and musical traditions. He explores why, out of the abundance of compositional possibilities, composers choose to replicate some patterns and neglect others. Meyer devotes the latter part of his book to a sketch-history of nineteenth-century music. He shows explicitly how the beliefs and attitudes of Romanticism influenced the choices of composers from Beethoven to Mahler and into our own time. "A monumental work. . . . Most authors concede the relation of music to its cultural milieu, but few have probed so deeply in demonstrating this inte...
The Band was one of the most celebrated and influential groups to arrive on the music scene in the late 1960s. The Band's members - Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Levon Helm - fashioned something magically new out of musically traditional components: old-time country and gospel, Preservation Hall jazz, medicine-show vaudeville. They started as The Hawks, a teenage backup group for the rockabilly renegade Ronnie Hawkins, touring the endless highways through the heart of the South. Eventually they headed north, where they left Hawkins to become Bob Dylan's band on the revolutionary electric tours of 1965 and 1966. From there they retreated to Woodstock, and, during a period of intense personal closeness and creativity, produced two of the hallmark albums of the era.
From the Fairlight CMI through MIDI to the digital audio workstations at the turn of the millennium, Modern Records, Maverick Methods examines a critical period in commercial popular music record production: the transformative digital age from the late 1970s until 2000. Drawing on a discography of more than 300 recordings across pop, rock, hip hop, dance and alternative musics from artists such as the Beastie Boys, Madonna, U2 and Fatboy Slim, and extensive and exclusive ethnographic work with many world-renowned recordists, Modern Records presents a fresh and insightful new perspective on one of the most significant eras in commercial music record production. The book traces the development of significant music technologies through the 1980s and 1990s, revealing how changing attitudes and innovative techniques of recording personnel reimagined recording processes and, finally, exemplifies the impact of these technologies and techniques via six comprehensive tech-processual analyses. This meticulously researched and timely book reveals the complexity of recordists' responses to a technological landscape in flux.
Presents brief entries covering the history, significant artists, styles and influence of blues music.