"Even before they joined forces, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II had written dozens of Broadway shows, but together they pioneered a new art form: the serious musical play. Their songs and dance numbers served to advance the drama and reveal character, a sharp break from the past and the template on which all future musicals would be built. [This is a portrait of that creative partnership]"--Amazon.com.

"Across seven decades, Bob Dylan has been the first singer of American song. As a writer and performer, he has rewritten the national songbook in a way that comes from his own vision and yet can feel as if it belongs to anyone who might listen. In Folk Music, Greil Marcus tells Dylan's story through seven of his most transformative songs. Marcus's point of departure is Dylan's ability to "see myself in others." Like Dylan's songs, this book is a work...

"As one of the most magnetic icons of modern pop culture, David Bowie seduced generations of fans with his music and counterculture persona. While Bowie's legacy as a musician is remarkable and genre-defying, as a visual performer he obliterate stage theatrics with his psychedelic aesthetics, larger-than-life image, and way of hovering on the border of the surreal. Bowie: Stardust, Rayguns & Moonage Daydreams chronicles the rise of David Bowie's career...

A candid assessment of the iconic musician's personal and professional life by his first wife traces their long-distance courtship, marriage, and creative partnership as well as the challenges that compromised their romance.

In his memoir, Bach recounts lurid tales of excess and debauchery as he toured the world with Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Motley Crue, Soundgarden, Pantera, Nine Inch Nails and Guns N' Roses. Filled with backstage photos from his own personal collection, 18 And Life on Skid Row is the story of hitting it big at a young age, and of a band that broke up in its prime. It is the story of a man who achieved his wildest dreams, only to lose his family, and then...

The little-known story of Leonard Cohen's concert tour to the front lines of the Yom Kippur War, including never-before-seen selections from an unfinished manuscript by Cohen and rare photographs. In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen -- thirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end -- traveled from his home on the Greek island of Hydra to the chaos and bloodshed of the Sinai desert when Egypt attacked Israel on the...

When Anna Kramer, a Los Alamos piano teacher, inherits the journals and scores of composer Hana Weissova, she is mystified by this bequest from a woman she does not know. Hana's music, however, soon begins to uncover forgotten emotions, while her journals, which begin in 1945 after she is released from a concentration camp, slowly reveal decades-old secrets that Anna and her family have kept buried. Dissonance is a quiet and dramatic novel that offers...

"Think of a composer right now. Was it a white man? Perhaps in old-fashioned clothing and wild hair? The music history we're told is one dominated by men, and even then, only a select few enter the zeitgeist. This conventional history perpetuates the myth of "great works" created by "genius" artists. Men who enjoyed institutional privilege during their lifetimes and have since been enshrined by an industry of publishers and record labels. But just...

Sounds and Sweet Airs reveals the hidden stories of eight remarkable female composers, taking the reader on a journey from seventeenth-century Medici Florence to London in the Blitz.