Featuring unique photographs and original drawings from Kartomi's field observations of instruments and performances, Musical Journeys in Sumatra provides a comprehensive musical introduction to this neglected, very large island, with its hundreds of ethno-linguistic-musical groups. Kartomi is a professor of music at Monash University in Australia.

Despite what the doomsayers have been predicting for years, classical music is not dead. In fact, the next generation of young musicians is passionate, focused and driven to change the world through their music, and change how the world sees classical music. From the slums of Ukraine to the halls of Manhattan's elite Juilliard School, Driven tells the stories of six incredible young musicians creating a life in music in the modern world. All made their national broadcast debut on the NPR/PBS program From the Top. Praise for Driven:"Nick Romeo is a skilled writer who immediately captures your imagination and interest. Each of the musician profiles provide the reader with access into the world of aspiring classical musicians. And, at the conclusion of each chapter, I found myself wanting to know more about these young musicians. Driven should be required reading for all undergraduate music students."-Toni-Marie Montgomery, Dean; Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music, Northwestern University "Driven is an engaging and informative read. For anyone convinced that classical music is dead, this book is refreshing proof to the contrary."-Glenn Dicterow, Concertmaster, New York Philharmonic and Violin Faculty, The Juilliard School "Driven reveals a new artistic sensibility by some of today's leading young artists. These talented performers boldly engage their audiences with all musics, styles, and settings. Economic barriers are removed, new media are employed, and the concert experience is truly shared between artist and listener. Nick Romeo not only chronicles the new face of classical music but also a new heard as well!"-Robert Blocker, The Henry and Lucy Moses Dean of Music, Yale University "Driven is ultimately about the future of inventiveness, ambition, imagination, dedication and responsibility among those considered part of a slacker generation. No one can read these chapters without being uplifted, and anyone who's plagued by rejection and reads about these young people will be inspired to keep trying."-Phil Jackson, Florida Weekly

How are conductors' silent gestures magicked into sound by a group of more than a hundred brilliant but belligerent musicians? The mute choreography of great conductors has fascinated and frustrated musicians and music-lovers for centuries. Orchestras can be inspired to the heights of musical and expressive possibility by their maestros, or flabbergasted that someone who doesn't even make a sound should be elevated to demigod-like status by the public. This is the first book to go inside the rehearsal rooms of some of the most inspirational orchestral partnerships in the world - how Simon Rattle works at the Berlin Philharmonic, how Mariss Jansons deals with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, and how Claudio Abbado creates the world's most luxurious pick-up band every year with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. From London to Budapest, Bamberg to Vienna, great orchestral concerts are recreated as a collection of countless human and musical stories.

In A Language of Song, Samuel Charters—one of the pioneering collectors of African American music—writes of a trip to West Africa where he found “a gathering of cultures and a continuing history that lay behind the flood of musical expression [he] encountered everywhere . . . from Brazil to Cuba, to Trinidad, to New Orleans, to the Bahamas, to dance halls of west Louisiana and the great churches of Harlem.” In this book, Charters takes readers along to those and other places, including Jamaica and the Georgia Sea Islands, as he recounts experiences from a half-century spent following, documenting, recording, and writing about the Africa-influenced music of the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean. Each of the book’s fourteen chapters is a vivid rendering of a particular location that Charters visited. While music is always his focus, the book is filled with details about individuals, history, landscape, and culture. In first-person narratives, Charters relates voyages including a trip to the St. Louis home of the legendary ragtime composer Scott Joplin and the journey to West Africa, where he met a man who performed an hours-long song about the Europeans’ first colonial conquests in Gambia. Throughout the book, Charters traces the persistence of African musical culture despite slavery, as well as the influence of slaves’ songs on subsequent musical forms. In evocative prose, he relates a lifetime of travel and research, listening to brass bands in New Orleans; investigating the emergence of reggae, ska, and rock-steady music in Jamaica’s dancehalls; and exploring the history of Afro-Cuban music through the life of the jazz musician Bebo Valdés. A Language of Song is a unique expedition led by one of music’s most observant and well-traveled explorers.

What is Music? Music is rhythm. Music is melody. Music is feeling... and oh, so much more. In this richly layered compendium, Aliki shares her keen insight about music and all its themes and variations. Ah, Music! is about composers and instruments. It's about artists and performers. It's about history -- from the earliest music through classical, modern, jazz, and popular times. It's about diversity and pleasure. If you have a love of music in your bones, or if you are just learning, or if you are about to play in your first recital, it's about you. Ah, music!

This masterful explorationof American roots music--country, rockabilly, and the blues--spotlights the artists who created a distinctly American sound, including Ernest Tubb, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Elvis Presley, Merle Haggard, and Sleepy LaBeef. In incisive portraits based on searching interviews with these legendary performers, Peter Guralnick captures the boundless passion that drove these men to music-making and that kept them determinedly, and sometimes almost desperately, on the road.