Results by title

Near the end of the third decade of the sixteenth century, a five-volume set of madrigal and motet partbooks was assembled in Florence and sent as a gift—or "musical embassy"—to the English court of Henry VIII. The manuscript set—minus the missing altus part—has been owned since 1935 by the Newberry Library in Chicago; but until H. Colin Slim's exhaustive efforts, no thorough study of the history or contents of the partbooks had been undertaken.

At first encounter, these partbooks yield no clues concerning their provenance, their composers' names, or the reasons for their dispatch to England. In his search for this information, Professor Slim used the musicologists' customary tools, namely, biobibliography, concordances, and textual and musical analysis. But he also used bibliographers' tools not always employed by musicologists: watermarks, bindings, script, orthography, and illuminations.

As a result of his efforts, the author was able to identify nearly all the works' composers and the manuscripts' expert illuminator. He also presents a detailed description of the binding process and the probably background of the scribe, places the political and social references in the works, and determines the route the volumes may have taken after they left Henry's library.

By placing the date of the partbooks' arrival in England around 1528, Professor Slim suggests that the musical culture of the early Tudor court was less French than has hitherto been thought. Indeed, the presence of the partbooks in Henry's library makes them the earliest evidence of the Italian madrigal in England. The author also provides new and significant data on the artistic and historical position of Philippe Verdelot, the partbooks' most extensively represented composer.

Volume I of this set contains two parts. The first, dealing with the manuscript itself, contains the history of the partbooks, information on their origin, composers, texts, and their importance as a gift to Henry VIII. Part II, dealing with the music, discusses general musical traits, the motets, the madrigals, the results of collation, and the appearance of some of the Newberry motets and madrigals in other sources.

This novel is one of Dan Gerber's triumphs. From the author of American Atlas, Out of Control, and Grass Fires, Gerber's A Voice From the River followed Grass Fires to prominence on national bestseller lists. This novel once again affirms the Gerber's solid reputation for writing about the confrontation of the Spirit World and what some consider to be the Last of Days.

      George E. Stephens, the most
        important African-American war correspondent of his era, served in the
        famed black Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, subject of the film Glory.
        His letters from the front, published in the New York Weekly Anglo-African,
        brilliantly detail two wars: one against the Confederacy and one against
        the brutal, debilitating racism within his own Union Army. Together with
        Donald Yacovone's biographical introduction detailing Stephens's life
        and times, they provide a singular perspective on the greatest crisis
        in the history of the United States.
      Stephens chronicled the African-American
        quest for freedom in reports from southern Maryland and eastern Virginia
        in 1861 and 1862 that detailed, among other issues of the day, the Army
        of the Potomac's initial encounter with slavery, the heroism of fugitive
        slaves, and the brutality both Southerners and Union troops inflicted
        on them.
      From the inception of the
        Fifty-fourth early in 1863 Stephens was the unit's voice, telling of its
        struggle against slavery and its quest to win the pay it had been promised.
        His description of the July 18, 1863, assault on Battery Wagner near Charleston,
        South Carolina, and his writings on the unit's eighteen-month campaign
        to be paid as much as white troops are gripping accounts of continued
        heroism in the face of persistent insult.
      The Weekly Anglo-African
        was the preeminent African-American newspaper of its time. Stephens's
        correspondence, intimate and authoritative, takes in an expansive array
        of issues and anticipates nearly all modern assessments of the black role
        in the Civil War. His commentary on the Lincoln administration's wartime
        policy and his conviction that the issues of race and slavery were central
        to nineteenth-century American life mark him as a major American social
        critic.
 

Anzhelina Polonskaya is considered one of the freshest voices among young Russian poets. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she was not educated in the classic literary tradition, nor nurtured by the well-known Moscow and Petersburg journals. This has freed her from self-consciously struggling under the weight of her country's literary tradition, and her independent, even idiosyncratic, voice informs poems filled with sharp images, acute observations, and both the pains and joys of personal experience.

Drawn from her most recent Russian collections, A Voice: Selected Poems explores the poet's ongoing fascinations—desolate places, long journeys, a synesthesia of sensory stimulation, and the presence of death. Also on display is her Chekhovian gift for unexpected closure. This is a promising English-language debut from a poet already gaining international attention.

Addressing Native American studies past, present, and future, the essays in New Indians, Old Wars tackle the discipline head-on, presenting a radical revision of the popular view of the American West in the process. Instead of luxuriating in the West's past glories or accepting the widespread historians' view of it as a shared place, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues that the American West should be fundamentally understood as stolen.

Cook-Lynn says that the Indian Wars of Resistance to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial effort to seize native lands and resources must be given standing in the face of the ever-growing imperial narrative of America--because the terror the world is now witnessing may be the direct consequence of events which began in America's earliest dealings with the natives of this continent. Cook-Lynn's story examines the ongoing and perennial relationship of conflict between colonizers and indigenous people, and it is a story that every American must read.

Cook-Lynn understands that the story of the American West teaches the political language of land theft and tyranny. She argues that to remedy this situation, Native American studies must be considered and pursued as its own discipline, rather than as a subset of history or anthropology. She makes an impassioned claim that such a shift, not merely an institutional or theoretical change, could allow Native American studies to play an important role in defending the sovereignty of indigenous nations today.

Climate change and globalization are opening up the Arctic for resource development and exploitation. But what about the views, interests, and needs of the peoples who already live in the region? Featuring essays by both academics and Arctic peoples themselves, this new book covers the social, legal, political, geographical, scientific, environmental, and creative questions related to Arcticness and addresses the exceptional challenges faced by the Arctic region and its local communities. 

In this audacious book, Ana María Ochoa Gautier explores how listening has been central to the production of notions of language, music, voice, and sound that determine the politics of life. Drawing primarily from nineteenth-century Colombian sources, Ochoa Gautier locates sounds produced by different living entities at the juncture of the human and nonhuman. Her "acoustically tuned" analysis of a wide array of texts reveals multiple debates on the nature of the aural. These discussions were central to a politics of the voice harnessed in the service of the production of different notions of personhood and belonging. In Ochoa Gautier's groundbreaking work, Latin America and the Caribbean emerge as a historical site where the politics of life and the politics of expression inextricably entangle the musical and the linguistic, knowledge and the sensorial.