In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950s and ’60s who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world.

Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa’s struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking exultation of modern jazz. The result was an abundance of conversation, collaboration, and tension between African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization. This collective biography demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered politics and culture on both continents.

In a crucial moment when freedom electrified the African diaspora, these black artists sought one another out to create new modes of expression. Documenting individuals and places, from Lagos to Chicago, from New York to Cape Town, Robin Kelley gives us a meditation on modernity: we see innovation not as an imposition from the West but rather as indigenous, multilingual, and messy, the result of innumerable exchanges across a breadth of cultures.

This collection of ten essays constitutes the proceedings of a two-day conference held at Harvard in October 2007. The conference focused on three medieval manuscripts of Ambrosian chant owned by Houghton Library. The Ambrosian liturgy and its music, practiced in and around medieval Milan, were rare regional survivors of the Catholic Church’s attempt to adopt a universal Roman liturgy and the chant now known as Gregorian. Two of the manuscripts under scrutiny had been recently acquired (one perhaps the oldest surviving source of Ambrosian music), and the third manuscript, long held among the Library’s collections of illuminated manuscripts, had been newly identified as Ambrosian.

The generously illustrated essays gathered here represent the work of established experts and younger scholars. Together they explore the manuscripts as physical objects and place them in their urban and historical contexts, as well as in the musical and ecclesiastical context of Milan, Italy, and medieval Europe.

Tired of Tannhäuser? Bored with Bohème? Open your imagination to boundless creativity and wide-ranging repertory of American opera. Elise K. Kirk provides a treasure trove of information that fills in the long-neglected history of opera in the United States. Looking at more than 100 works, Kirk sketches the musical traits, provides plot summaries, describes sets and stagings, and offers in-depth profiles of performers, composers, and librettists. 

Beginning with the English-influenced harle-quinade of the revolutionary period, Kirk follows the development of comic opera, the rise of melodramatic romanticism, the emergence of American grand opera and verismo, and the explosion of eclectic forms that characterized American opera in the twentieth century. Devoting particular attention to women and African American composers and librettists, Kirk explores how American operas incorporated indigenous elements such as jazz, popular song, folk music, Native American motifs, and Hollywood's cinematic techniques. She also discusses radio and television's impact, the advent of opera workshops in universities, the integration of multimedia effects into productions, and the ways innovations such as co-commissioning and joint staging have helped sustain the genre in the face of declining federal support.

Though ubiquitous today, available as a single microchip and found in any electronic device requiring sound, the synthesizer when it first appeared was truly revolutionary. Something radically new--an extraordinary rarity in musical culture--it was an instrument that used a genuinely new source of sound: electronics. How this came to be--how an engineering student at Cornell and an avant-garde musician working out of a storefront in California set this revolution in motion--is the story told for the first time in Analog Days, a book that explores the invention of the synthesizer and its impact on popular culture.

The authors take us back to the heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the technology was analog, the synthesizer was an experimental instrument, and synthesizer concerts could and did turn into happenings. Interviews with the pioneers who determined what the synthesizer would be and how it would be used--from inventors Robert Moog and Don Buchla to musicians like Brian Eno, Pete Townshend, and Keith Emerson--recapture their visions of the future of electronic music and a new world of sound.

Tracing the development of the Moog synthesizer from its initial conception to its ascension to stardom in Switched-On Bach, from its contribution to the San Francisco psychedelic sound, to its wholesale adoption by the worlds of film and advertising, Analog Days conveys the excitement, uncertainties, and unexpected consequences of a new technology that would provide the soundtrack for a critical chapter of our cultural history.

Winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award in Concert Music Books

Proposing that Arnold Schoenberg has been more discussed than heard, more tolerated than loved, Allen Shawn puts aside ultimate judgments about Schoenberg’s place in music history to explore the composer’s fascinating world in a series of linked essays—“soundings”—that are both searching and wonderfully suggestive. Approaching Schoenberg primarily from the listener’s point of view, Shawn plunges into the details of some of Schoenberg’s works while at the same time providing a broad overview of his involvements in music, painting, and the history through which he lived.

Verdi’s Attila, his ninth opera, had its premiere at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice in March 1846. Based on the German play Attila, King of the Huns, the libretto has its own storied history: as Verdi fell seriously ill before the work’s completion, the main librettist moved permanently to Madrid, leaving the last act of Attila only a sketch. It was then that Verdi called upon Francesco Maria Piave, the librettist for two of his earlier works, who at the composer’s behest scratched plans for a large choral finale and decided instead to concentrate on the dramatic roles of the protagonists.

In years since, Attila has become one of Verdi’s most popular and oft-staged early works. The composer's inimitable vitality, soaring arcs of melody, grand choruses, and passion are here amply apparent. This critical edition, based on Verdi’s autograph full score preserved at the British Library, restores the opera’s original text and accurately reflects the composer's colorful and elaborate musical setting, while Helen M. Greenwald’s masterful introduction discusses the opera’s origins, sources, and performance questions, and her critical commentary details editorial problems and their solutions.