The Enjoyment of Music by 
What's That Sound? by 
Rap Music and Culture by
The primary source writings in this anthology have been selected to provide your readers with a broad range of viewpoints on rap music and culture. Students are encouraged to see the validity of divergent opinions, so that they may understand the topics of discussion inclusively. An important question about the topic is presented in each chapter, such as Does rap culture perpetuate violence? and the viewpoints that follow are organized based on their response to the question. Fact boxes summarize important information for researchers, and an extensive bibliography is included.
Musicophilia by
Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does—humans are a musical species. Oliver Sacks’s compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people—from a man who is struck by lightning and suddenly inspired to become a pianist at the age of forty-two, to an entire group of children with Williams syndrome, who are hypermusical from birth; from people with “amusia,” to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans, to a man whose memory spans only seven seconds—for everything but music. Our exquisite sensitivity to music can sometimes go wrong: Sacks explores how catchy tunes can subject us to hours of mental replay, and how a surprising number of people acquire nonstop musical hallucinations that assault them night and day. Yet far more frequently, music goes right: Sacks describes how music can animate people with Parkinson’s disease who cannot otherwise move, give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak, and calm and organize people whose memories are ravaged by Alzheimer’s or amnesia. Music is irresistible, haunting, and unforgettable, and in Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks tells us why.
The Song Is Ended by
"Embraceable You." "Someone to Watch Over Me." "Alexander's Ragtime Band." "My Funny Valentine." "White Christmas." Irving Berlin once wrote a song entitled "The Song is Ended, But the Melody Lingers On," and surely the title is a perfect epitaph for an incomparable era of American songwriting that endowed us with so many of our most beloved ballads and rousing showstoppers. The Song is Ended is the story of the Golden Age of American popular music, and a celebration of the enduring melodies and colorful life stories of five of this century's most engaging songwriters: Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers, with a fond bow in the direction of Victor Herbert and George M. Cohan. Author William G. Hyland provides an expert analysis of trends in popular songwriting during the first half of this century, escorting readers on a fascinating tour of the sights and sounds of fifty-odd years of American music, from the scratchy victrolas and Old World melodies of New York's teeming Lower East Side, to the hustle and bustle of Tin Pan Alley, to the hot rhythms and smoky clubs of the Jazz Age, to the sound stages of Hollywood and the glittering Broadway triumphs of "Showboat", "Anything Goes", "Porgy and Bess", "Pal Joey", and "Oklahoma!". Nostalgic lovers of good music will delight in the stories behind some of their favorite songs: Irving Berlin, for example, originally wrote his tender and romantic classic "I'll Be Loving You, Always," for a Marx Brothers revue (he wisely cut it), and he first composed "God Bless America" as an enlisted soldier in 1918, only to put it aside for almost twenty years when the pianist helping him rehearse for an army benefit complained "Geez, another patriotic song?" From Cole Porter's light-hearted and irrepressible "You're the Top" to Rodgers and Hart's wistful "Blue Moon" or the unforgettable "Summertime" from George Gershwin's masterful "Porgy and Bess," The Song is Ended captures the charm, freshness and vitality of a truly great era in American musical history. The melodies from this golden era truly linger on, just as Berlin predicted, and reverberate on every page of this superb volume.