Results by title

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).

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.

Rosenberg's memoir shines a light on the changing bluegrass scene of the early 1960s. Already a fan and aspiring musician, his appetite for banjo music quickly put him on the Jamboree stage. Rosenberg eventually played with Monroe and spent four months managing the Jamboree. Those heights gave him an eyewitness view of nothing less than bluegrass's emergence from the shadow of country music into its own distinct art form. As the likes of Bill Keith and Del McCoury played, Rosenberg watched Monroe begin to share a personal link to the music that tied audiences to its history and his life--and helped turn him into bluegrass's foundational figure.

An intimate look at a transformative time, Bluegrass Generation tells the inside story of how an American musical tradition came to be.

David Whiteis delves into how the current and upcoming Chicago blues generations carry on this legacy. Drawing on in-person interviews, Whiteis places the artists within the ongoing social and cultural reality their work reflects and helps create. Beginning with James Cotton, Eddie Shaw, and other bequeathers, he moves through an all-star council of elders like Otis Rush and Buddy Guy and on to inheritors and today's heirs apparent like Ronnie Baker Brooks, Shemekia Copeland, and Nellie "Tiger" Travis.

Insightful and wide-ranging, Blues Legacy reveals a constantly adapting art form that, whatever the challenges, maintains its links to a rich musical past.

David Bowie was a master of artifice and reinvention. In that same spirit, illustrator María Hesse and writer Fran Ruiz have created a vivid retelling of the life of David Robert Jones, from his working-class childhood to glam rock success to superstardom, concluding with the final recording sessions after his cancer diagnosis.

Narrated from the rock star’s point of view, Bowie colorfully renders both the personal and the professional turning points in a life marked by evolution and innovation. We see Bowie facing the sorrow of his brother’s mental illness, kicking a cocaine habit while other musicians succumbed to deadly overdoses, contending with a tumultuous love life, and radiating joy as a father. Along the way, he describes how he shattered the boundaries of song and society with a counterculture cast that included Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, and Freddie Mercury—as well as his own creations, Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke.

Evocatively illustrated from start to finish, Bowie is a stellar tribute to an inimitable star.

Buzz Busby’s move to Washington, D.C., in 1951 helped launch bluegrass in the nation’s capital while the intensity of his mandolin playing drew raves for its unrelenting pace and innovative style. His high lonesome singing rivaled that of Bill Monroe. Kip Lornell and Tom Mindte draw on interviews and some fifty hours of Busby speaking about his life to tell the story of a largely forgotten bluegrass virtuoso.

Busby and his band the Bayou Boys stood front and center on a mid-1950s D.C.-area TV show that, though short-lived, catalyzed the formation of the city’s bluegrass community. Time with the Louisiana Hayride and classic if little-heard bluegrass sides like “Lonesome Wind” seemed to promise a bright future. But a devastating car wreck and a host of legal and personal troubles triggered a long decline into drug and alcohol abuse that undermined Busby’s career and led him to sum up, “I started at the top and diligently worked my way to the bottom.”

Entertaining and vivid, Buzz Busby tells the story of a musician’s musician and his hardscrabble life in bluegrass.