Music Reviews & Criticism

Where previous accounts of the Renaissance have not fully acknowledged the role that music played in this decisive period of cultural history, Laur...

Punk rock culture in a preeminently average town Synonymous with American mediocrity, Peoria was fertile ground for the boredom- and anger-fueled f...

What happened to musical modernism? When did it end? Did it end? In this unorthodox Lacanian account of European New Music, Seth Brodsky focuses on...

What made Bowie special? What made him the cultural icon he is today? And what made millions of people around the world tune into his peculiar wave...

Detailed overview of Handel's final 22 operas - including major masterpieces such as Orlando, Ariodante and Alcina and the brilliant lighter works ...

An expert and informative appraisal of all of Elgar's works - from his juvenilia to the unfinished 3rd symphony - by the author of the acclaimed Ge...

What makes a song sound foreign? What makes it sound “American,” or Brazilian? Caetano Veloso’s 2004 American songbook album, A Foreign Sound, is a...

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, you’d do best to hone your chops and avoid clichés (like the one that begins this senten...

Serving a Great and Noble Art is the second volume of the history of the Eastman School of Music, beginning in 1932 after George Eastman's death, a...

In Tokyo in the early 1990s, an indie band called Flipper’s Guitar was at the forefront of a new wave in Japanese popular music known as Shibuya-ke...

Exposing the depth of two major artists' philosophies, creative visions, stylistic tendencies, and contributions to their craft, this unprecedented...

After a string of commercial disappointments, in 1986 Australian rock band The Church were simultaneously dropped by Warner Brothers in the US and ...

At the height of Tim Maia’s soaring fame, he joined a radical, extraterrestrial-obsessed cult and created two plus albums of some of Brazil’s—and t...

The formative early ballets of West Side Story creators Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins explored in detail for the very first time. 2022 CHOI...

Create, Produce, Consume explores the cycle of musical experience for musicians, professionals, and budding entrepreneurs looking to break into the...

Carole King’s Tapestry is both an anthemic embodiment of second-wave feminism and an apotheosis of the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter sound and sc...

Listen to Soul! Exploring a Musical Genre provides an overview of soul music for fans of the genre, with a focus on 50 must-hear singers, songs, an...

This pioneering book by an acclaimed expert is the first to discuss all of Bach’s unaccompanied pieces in one volume, including an examination of c...

Contradicting assumptions that disco albums are shallow and packed with filler, Donna Summer’s double album Once Upon A Time stands out as a piece ...

“Unique and highly personal. The photos are beautiful and vivid, providing an eyewitness account of this remarkable moment in time. “—Dennis Elsas,...

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the ...

A major new study piecing together the intriguing but fragmentary evidence surrounding the lives of minstrels to highlight how these seemingly peri...

Performing Folk Songs is the first full-length volume to explore English folk singing from the perspective of performance studies. Using archival s...