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A musical genre forever outside the lines With a claim on artists from Jimmie Rodgers to Jason Isbell, Americana can be hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. John Milward¿s Americanaland is filled with the enduring performers and vivid stories that are at the heart of Americana. At base a hybrid of rock and country, Americana is also infused with folk, blues, R&B, bluegrass, and other types of roots music. Performers like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Gram Parsons used these ingredients to create influential music that took well-established genres down exciting new roads. The name Americana was coined in the 1990s to describe similarly inclined artists like Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, and Wilco. Today, Brandi Carlile and I¿m With Her are among the musicians carrying the genre into the twenty-first century. Essential and engaging, Americanaland chronicles the evolution and resonance of this ever-changing amalgam of American music. Margie Greve¿s hand-embroidered color portraits offer a portfolio of the pioneers and contemporary practitioners of Americana.

Composers like Charles Ives, Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich created works that indelibly commemorated American places. Denise Von Glahn analyzes the soundscapes of fourteen figures whose "place pieces" tell us much about the nation's search for its own voice and about its ever-changing sense of self. She connects each composer's feelings about the United States and their reasons for creating a piece to the music, while analyzing their compositional techniques, tunes, and styles. Approaching the compositions in chronological order, Von Glahn reveals how works that celebrated the wilderness gave way to music engaged with humanity's influence--benign and otherwise--on the landscape, before environmentalism inspired a return to nature themes in the late twentieth century. Wide-ranging and astute, The Sounds of Place explores high art music's role in the making of national myth and memory.

These previously unpublished lectures by Elliott Carter date to the summer of 1967, when the acclaimed composer taught at the Contemporary Music Workshop held by the University of Minnesota. Leading an introductory course on orchestra repertoire, Carter gave nine hours of lectures covering principal topics like how to live with the musical present and whether the symphony orchestra was a relic of the past or a possible active force for new music. But Carter's observations and prompts by audience questions broadened the discussion into areas ranging from electronic music to analyses of works by other artists and himself. Laura Emmery presents the complete text from each session alongside introductions, commentary, and annotated examples that provide valuable context for readers. Expansive and essential, Elliott Carter Speaks opens up the artist's teaching and introspection to new contemporary perspectives on his thought and art. Please note that the order and arrangement of materials in this book differs from that of Elliott Carter's original lectures.

The collected writings of composer Ben Johnston

The accordion in the new world

"As a member of Poster Children, Rose Marshack took part in entwined revolutions. Marshack and other women seized a much-elevated profile in music during the indie rock breakthrough while the advent of new digital technologies transformed the recording and marketing of music. Touring in a van, meeting your idols, juggling a programming job with music, keeping control and credibility, the perils of an independent record label (and the greater perils of a major)-Marshack chronicles the band's day-to-day life and punctuates her account with excerpts from her tour reports and hard-learned lessons on how to rock, program, and teach while female. She also details the ways Poster Children applied punk's DIY ethos to digital tech as a way to connect with fans via then-new media like pkids listservs, internet radio, and enhanced CDs. An inside look at a scene and a career, Play Like a Man is the evocative and humorous tale of one woman's life in the trenches and online"--

"A pivotal twentieth-century composer, Samuel Barber earned a long list of honors and accolades that included two Pulitzer Prizes for Music and the public support of figures like Serge Koussevitzky and Marian Anderson. Barber's works have since became standard in concert repertoire and continue to flourish across high art and popular culture. Acclaimed biographer Howard Pollack (George Gershwin, Aaron Copland) offers a multifaceted account of Barber's life and music while placing the artist in his social and cultural milieu. Born into a musical extended family, Barber pursued his ambitions from childhood. Pollack follows Barber's path from his precocious youth and training through a career where, from the start, the composer consistently received prizes, fellowships, and other recognition. Stylistic analyses of works like Adagio for Strings, the Second Symphony, the opera Vanessa, and Piano Concerto No. 1 stand alongside revealing accounts of the music's commissioning, performance, reception, and legacy. Throughout, Pollack weaves in accounts of Barber's encounters with musical contemporaries like Leonard Bernstein and Dmitri Mitropoulos, performers from Eleanor Steber and Leontyne Price to Vladimir Horowitz, patrons, admirers, and a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in and out of the arts. He also provides an eloquent portrait of the composer's decades-long relationship with, and break from, Gian Carlo Menotti. Informed by new interviews and immense archival research, Samuel Barber is the long-awaited critical and personal biography of a monumental figure in twentieth-century American music"--

"A beloved member of the country music community, David "Stringbean" Akeman found nationwide fame as a cast member of Hee Haw. The 1973 murder of Stringbean and his wife forever changed Nashville's sense of itself. Millions of others mourned not only the slain couple but the passing of the way of life that country music had long represented. Taylor Hagood merges the story of Stringbean's life with an account of murder and courtroom drama. Mentored by Uncle Dave Macon and Bill Monroe, Stringbean was a bridge to country's early days. His instrumental savvy and old-time singing style drew upon a deep love for traditional country music that, along with his humor and humanity, won him the reverence of younger artists and made his violent death all the more shocking. Hagood delves into the unexpected questions and uneasy resolutions raised by the atmosphere of retribution surrounding the murder trial and recounts the redemption story that followed decades later"--

"Eloquently extolled by President John F. Kennedy, the idea that only artists in free societies can produce great art became a bedrock assumption of the Cold War. That this conviction defied centuries of historical evidence--to say nothing of achievements within the Soviet Union--failed to impact impregnable cultural Cold War doctrine. Horowitz shows how the efforts of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom were distorted by an anti-totalitarian "psychology of exile" traceable to its secretary general, the displaced Russian aristocrat/composer Nicolas Nabokov, and to Nabokov's hero Igor Stravinsky. In counterpoint, Horowitz investigates personal, social, and political factors that actually shape the creative act. He focuses on Stravinsky, who in Los Angeles experienced a "freedom not to matter," and Dmitri Shostakovich, who was both victim and beneficiary of Soviet cultural policies. He also takes a fresh look at cultural exchange and explores paradoxical similarities and differences framing the popularization of classical music in the Soviet Union and the United States. In closing, he assesses the Kennedy administration's arts advocacy initiatives and their pertinence to today's fraught American national identity. Challenging long-entrenched myths, this book newly explores the tangled relationship between the ideology of freedom and ideals of cultural achievement"--