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In Volume One, Bach scholar Russell Stinson edits essays from Stephen A. Crist, Michael Marissen, David Schulenberg, and other experts. Topics range from issues of composition and improvisation to works like the Orgelbüchlein and the First Brandenburg Concerto.

Contributors: James A. Brokaw II, Eric T. Chafe, Stephen A. Crist, Michael Marissen, David Schulenberg, and Russell Stinson

Launched in 1995, Bach Perspectives has become the premier English-language serial book series dedicated to cutting-edge Bach scholarship. The University of Illinois Press now offers the first four volumes in open access editions available for free to all interested readers.

From 1727 to 1787, the Bach and the Breitkopf families enjoyed close professional ties forged by the growing trade between music composers and music printers. The second volume of Bach Perspectives examines the inventive and far-flung activities of the Breitkopf firm from the vantage point of its commerce with J. S. Bach and his relatives.

Contributors: Gregory G. Butler, Robert M. Cammarota, Peggy Daub, Andreas Glöckner, George R. Hill, Yoshitake Kobayashi, Ortrun Landmann, Ernest May, Hans-Joachim Schulze, George B. Stauffer, and Neal Zaslaw

Launched in 1995, Bach Perspectives has become the premier English-language serial book series dedicated to cutting-edge Bach scholarship. The University of Illinois Press now offers the first four volumes in open access editions available for free to all interested readers.

The third volume of the acclaimed series features a roster of scholars analyzing the crucial influence of J. S. Bach’s music upon compositions by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Hindemith, and others. Throughout, the contributors highlight Bach’s subtle presence in the history of composition and illuminate the intertwined works of Bach and his successors.

Contributors: Thomas Christensen, Ludwig Finscher, Walter Frisch, Stephen Hinton, William Kinderman, and Robert L. Marshall

Launched in 1995, Bach Perspectives has become the premier English-language serial book series dedicated to cutting-edge Bach scholarship. The University of Illinois Press now offers the first four volumes in open access editions available for free to all interested readers.

The fourth volume of Bach Perspectives analyzes J. S. Bach’s orchestral works, especially his concertos, and the interpretation and performance of his music in general. The diverse contributors come from the fields of performance, organology, music theory, and music history, and their expertise across multiple areas provides an interdisciplinary perspective to their chapters.

Contributors: Gregory G. Butler, John Butt, John Koster, Alfred Mann, Mary Oleskiewicz, William Renwick, David Schulenberg, Jeanne Swack, and Paul Walker

Gregory Butler focuses on Bach's Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings in E Major (BWV 1053) as a pastiche created by a process of assemblage of three earlier heterogeneous movements. Pieter Dirksen delves into the source history of the Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings in F Minor (BWV 1056) and concludes it represents a transcription of an earlier violin concerto in G minor. David Schulenberg investigates the generic ambiguity of the concerto in the early eighteenth century and how it diverged from the sonata to become a distinct genre. Completing the volume is Christoph Wolff's examination of the ""Siciliano"" as a slow movement in Bach's concertos and its implications for the source history of his Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings in E Major (BWV 1053).

In this volume, Wolfgang Hirschmann proposes an ethnographic approach that contextualizes Bach's works, addressing the aesthetic paths he took as well as those he did not pursue. Steven Zohn's essay considers Telemann's contribution to the orchestral Ouverture genre, observering how Telemann's approach to integrating the national styles of his time was quite different from, but no less rich than, Bach's. Andrew Talle compares settings and strategies of Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust by Bach and Graupner. Alison Dunlop presents valuable primary research on Muffat, the most commonly cited keyboard music composer in Vienna during Bach's lifetime. Finally, Michael Maul sheds new light on the Scheibe-Birnbaum controversy, contextualizing the most famous critique of J. S. Bach's compositional style by discussing the other composers that Scheibe critiqued.

Sarah Jane Nelson chronicles Hunter’s song collecting adventures alongside portraits of the singers and mentors he met along the way. The guitar-strumming Hunter picked up the recording habit to expand his repertoire but almost immediately embraced the role of song preservationist. Being a local allowed Hunter to merge his native Ozark earthiness with sharp observational skills to connect--often more than once--with his singers. Hunter’s own ability to be present added to that sense of connection. Despite his painstaking approach, ballad collecting was also a source of pleasure for Hunter. Ultimately, his dedication to capturing Ozarks song culture in its natural state brought Hunter into contact with people like Vance Randolph, Mary Parler, and non-academic folklorists who shared his values.

A close look at the lives of working musicians who aren’t the center of their stage.

Secret (and not-so-secret) weapons, side-of-the-stagers, rhythm and horn sections, backup singers, accompanists—these and other “band people” are the anonymous but irreplaceable character actors of popular music. Through interviews and incisive cultural critique, writer and musician Franz Nicolay provides a portrait of the musical middle class. Artists talk frankly about their careers and attitudes toward their craft, work environment, and group dynamics, and shed light on how support musicians make sense of the weird combination of friend group, gang, small business consortium, long-term creative collaboration, and chosen family that constitutes a band. Is it more important to be a good hang or a virtuoso player? Do bands work best as democracies or autocracies? How do musicians with children balance their personal and professional lives? How much money is too little? And how does it feel to play on hundreds of records, with none released under your name? In exploring these and other questions, Band People gives voice to those who collaborate to create and dissects what it means to be a laborer in the culture industry.

Wide-ranging and illustrated with twenty color images, Banjo Roots and Branches offers a wealth of new information to scholars of African American and folk musics as well as the worldwide community of banjo aficionados.

Contributors: Greg C. Adams, Nick Bamber, Jim Dalton, George R. Gibson, Chuck Levy, Shlomo Pestcoe, Pete Ross, Tony Thomas, Saskia Willaert, and Robert B. Winans.

An exploration into the history and practice of trova, a genre of music that is the soul of Yucatán.

Yucatecan trova is a music genre comprising a type of romantic song that is considered “the soul of Yucatán and Yucatecans.” This first book on Yucatecan trova offers an insider’s view of the history and practice of a treasured cultural heritage. A central theme of Gabriela Vargas-Cetina’s ethnography is what she refers to as the “beautiful politics of music” practiced by Yucatecan trova patrons and organizations, which is a way of asserting the importance of groups and issues through nonconfrontational means.

Trova emerged on the peninsula at the end of the nineteenth century and continues to be part of the general urban soundscape in the states of Yucatán and Campeche. Until the 1920s, this music was little known outside Yucatán and became absorbed into the larger Latin American Bolero genre, making it difficult to perceive its uniqueness and relation to life in Yucatán.

Vargas-Cetina, a native Yucatecan and trova musician, offers ethnographic insight into the local music scene. With family connections, she embedded herself as a trovadora, and her fieldwork—singing, playing the guitar in a trova group, and extensively researching the genre and talking with fellow enthusiasts and experts—ensued. Trova, like other types of artistic endeavors, is the result of collaboration and social milieu. She describes the dedicated trova clubs, cultural institutions, the Yucatecan economy of agricultural exports, and identity politics that helped the music come about and have maintained it today.

Positioned in the larger context of the music of Mexico and Latin America and engaging with theories of modernity and cosmopolitanism, experimental ethnography, and the anthropology of organizations, Beautiful Politics of Music consists of rigorous scholarship. It is also a warm tribute to performers and songs that have inspired many people around the world for more than two centuries.

In 1973, Western music was banned in the People’s Republic of China. But in a remarkable breakthrough cultural exchange, the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted a tour of closed-off China, becoming the first American orchestra to visit the communist nation. Jennifer Lin’s Beethoven in Beijing provides a fabulous photo-rich oral history of this boundary-breaking series of concerts the orchestra performed under famed conductor Eugene Ormandy.

Lin draws from interviews, personal diaries, and news accounts to give voice to the American and Chinese musicians, diplomats, journalists, and others who participated in and witnessed this historic event. Beethoven in Beijing is filled with glorious images as well as anecdotes ranging from amusing sidewalk Frisbee sessions and acupuncture treatments for sore musicians to a tense encounter involving Madame Mao dictating which symphony was to be played at a concert. 

A companion volume to the film of the same name, Beethoven in Beijing shows how this 1973 tour came at the dawn of a resurgence of interest in classical music in China—now a vital source of revenue for touring orchestras.

This introduction to a challenging contemporary composer delves into the theory and philosophy of repetition.
 
The work of Austrian composer Bernhard Lang eludes easy categorization. While rooted simultaneously in DJ culture, free jazz, pop culture, and the Austro-European new music scene, his oeuvre explicitly foregrounds repetition. He is, in his own words, a “repeat offender.”
 
Bernhard Lang serves as a critical guide to the composer’s music and traces the phenomenon of repetition throughout his oeuvre. To examine Lang’s repetitive aesthetics, Christine Dysers employs various philosophical methods, such as Gilles Deleuze’s differential ontology. Fusing critical musicology, aesthetic theory, poststructuralist thought, and music analysis, Bernhard Lang brings fresh insight to the work of an award-winning contemporary composer.

Making headlines when it was launched in 2015, Omise’eke Tinsley’s undergraduate course “Beyoncé Feminism, Rihanna Womanism” has inspired students from all walks of life. In Beyoncé in Formation, Tinsley now takes her rich observations beyond the classroom, using the blockbuster album and video Lemonade as a soundtrack for vital new-millennium narratives.

Woven with candid observations about her life as a feminist scholar of African studies and a cisgender femme married to a trans spouse, Tinsley’s “Femme-onade” mixtape explores myriad facets of black women’s sexuality and gender. Turning to Beyoncé’s “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” Tinsley assesses black feminist critiques of marriage and then considers the models of motherhood offered in “Daddy Lessons,” interspersing these passages with memories from Tinsley’s multiracial family history. Her chapters on nontraditional bonds culminate in a discussion of contemporary LGBT politics through the lens of the internet-breaking video “Formation,” underscoring why Beyoncé’s black femme-inism isn’t only for ciswomen. From pleasure politics and the struggle for black women’s reproductive justice to the subtext of blues and country music traditions, the landscape in this tour is populated by activists and artists (including Loretta Lynn) and infused with vibrant interpretations of Queen Bey’s provocative, peerless imagery and lyrics.

In the tradition of Roxanne Gay’s Bad Feminist and Jill Lepore’s best-selling cultural histories, Beyoncé in Formation is the work of a daring intellectual who is poised to spark a new conversation about freedom and identity in America.

Eschewing the great composer style of music history, Andrew Talle takes us on a journey that looks at how ordinary people made music in Bach's Germany. Talle focuses in particular on the culture of keyboard playing as lived in public and private. As he ranges through a wealth of documents, instruments, diaries, account ledgers, and works of art, Talle brings a fascinating cast of characters to life. These individuals--amateur and professional performers, patrons, instrument builders, and listeners--inhabited a lost world, and Talle's deft expertise teases out the diverse roles music played in their lives and in their relationships with one another. At the same time, his nuanced re-creation of keyboard playing's social milieu illuminates the era's reception of Bach's immortal works.

The most successful bandleader of the 1920s, Paul Whiteman was an entertainment icon who played a major role in the mainstreaming of jazz. Whiteman and his band premiered Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Duke Ellington acknowledged his achievements. His astonishing ear for talent vaulted a who’s who of artists toward prominence. But Whiteman’s oversized presence eclipsed Black jazz musicians while his middlebrow music prompted later generations to jettison him from jazz history.

W. Anthony Sheppard’s collection of essays confronts the racial implications of Whiteman’s career. The contributors explore Whiteman’s broad impact on popular culture, tracking his work and influence in American marketing, animated films, the Black press, Hollywood, and the music publication industry, and following him behind the scenes with arrangers, into grand concert halls, across the Atlantic, into the courtroom, and on television.

Multifaceted and cutting-edge, Beyond the Bandstand explores the racial politics and artistic questions surrounding a controversial figure in popular music.

Contributors: Ryan Raul Bañagale, Stephanie Doktor, John Howland, Katherine M. Leo, Sarah Caissie Provost, W. Anthony Sheppard, Catherine Tackley, Elijah Wald, and Christi Jay Wells