Music

The essential, easy-to-use classical ballet guide - spanning nearly two centuries of classical dance - with entries for more than eighty works from ballet companies around the world, from Giselle...

'Anyone with the smallest interest in composition - not just concertos but novels, buildings, lives, you name it, should read this absorbing, spiky, dazzling book.' Adam Thirwell, TLS Books of...

This new edition of leading opera critic Rupert Christiansen's perennially popular Pocket Guide has between extensively revised, and incorporates many more operas from all periods, including recent works by Philip...

'This book distils what, at my advanced age, I feel able to say about music, musicians, and matters of my pianistic profession.' Ever since Alfred Brendel bid farewell to the...

A Guardian, Sunday Times, Mojo, Daily Telegraph and Observer Book of the YearLonglisted for the Penderyn Music Book Prize 2017As the sixties dream faded, a new flamboyant movement electrified the...

As the sixties dream faded, a new flamboyant movement electrified the world: GLAM! In Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds explores this most decadent of genres on both sides of the...

Benjamin Britten was one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century. He wrote a feast of music from an early age, first achieving international fame in 1945 with his...

Franz Schubert's Winterreise is at the same time one of the most powerful and one of the most enigmatic masterpieces in Western culture. In his new book, Schubert's Winter Journey:...

A Guardian, Mojo and Rough Trade Book of the YearFifty years on from the psychedelic summer of love, acclaimed music writer Rob Chapman explores what was really going on during...

A century after his death, Gustav Mahler is the most important composer of modern times. Displacing Beethoven as a box-office draw, his music offers more than the usual listening satisfactions....

Ian Bostridge is one of the outstanding singers of our time, celebrated for the quality of his voice but also for the exceptional intelligence he brings to bear on the...

The extraordinary group of Russian composers who came together in St Petersburg in the 1860s - long known as 'The Mighty Handful', but, as the moguchaya kuchka, better translated as...

33 Revolutions Per Minute tracks the turbulent relationship between popular music and politics, through 33 pivotal songs that span seven decades and four continents, from Billie Holiday singing 'Strange Fruit'...

Why 33? Partly because that's the number of rotations performed by a vinyl album in one minute, and partly because it takes a lot of songs to tell a story...

Richard Wagner remains, almost 130 years after his death, the most controversial composer in the history of music. Creator of huge and hugely ambitious operas, which have an immense immediate...

The piano is the best loved of musical instruments, thanks in part to the elegant symmetrical design of its ivory and ebony keyboard that ensures each pitch is reliably equidistant...

From country to blues, jazz to soul, bluegrass to the more recent alternative takes on these genres, It Still Moves looks at the paths trodden in American roots music and...

Joseph Haydn is one of the greatest and most innovative of all composers, yet in some ways he is still curiously misunderstood. This engaging new Pocket Guide assesses what Haydn's...

Pitched somewhere between Almost Famous and Withnail & I, "Apathy for the Devil" is a unique document of this most fascinating and troubling of decades - a story of inspiration,...

Britten's Children confronts the edgy subject of the composer's obsessional yet strangely innocent relationships with adolescent boys. One of the hallmarks of Benjamin Britten's music is his use of boys'...

Fundamentals of Musical Composition represents the culmination of more than forty years in Schoenberg's life devoted to the teaching of musical principles to students and composers in Europe and America....

The intimate - and surprising - autobiography of Britain's most adored band Prepare to meet the real McFly ... In 2003, Tom Fletcher, Danny Jones, Harry Judd and Dougie Poynter...

Armed with a bottle of Milk Thistle and unshakeable optimism, Nick Valentine has spent most of his adult life in fifth gear, betting on a Royal Flush while covertly holding...

'You are the music / While the music lasts' T.S. Eliot, The Four QuartetsDo babies remember music from the womb? Can classical music increase your child's IQ? Is music good...

'One of the greatest music photographers of all time...this book is indispensable to anyone who is a fan of Morrissey, or of great photography 'Classic Pop magazine'Unsurprisingly, given Cummin's history,...

The entire story of jazz - from its earliest days in New Orleans to the 1970s and beyond - told through archival material from Verve, the genre's most important label....

'This is pop history told from a delightfully original perspective.' Daily MailWith entries for every day of the year, ranging from mini-essays to pithy and engaging sentences, Don't Stop the...

Apple has sold more than ten million iPods since their debut in November 2001, and downloads at iTunes have now topped a quarter of a billion songs, with 1.25 million...

How to start and build a successful career as a DJ-from at-home mixing to making demos to playing to a live crowd Whether it's a digital or vinyl track of...

A lifetime of letters, collected for the first time, from the legendary The Beatles musician and songwriter John LennonJohn Lennon is one of the world's greatest-ever song writers, creator of...

'A fully realised portrait of a complex man: spiritual but peevish, brilliantly talented, but for ever shadowed by the Lennon/McCartney axis' The Times, Book of the Year From the author...

From Southern Greece to northern Russia, people living in agrarian communities have long believed in "dancing goddesses," mystical female spirits who spend their nights and days dancing in the fields...

5/5 - CLASSIC POP 4/5 - THE TELEGRAPH Everyone has their favourite era of the Bee Gees' career, but so much is still unclear about this celebrated but often misunderstood...

A landmark event in the world of music, Mozart's seven major librettos have finally been translated in verse with a sparkling poetic quality that matches the magnificence of the originals....

Through a deft compilation of primary sources-letters, memoirs, and personal accounts from composers, librettists, and performers-Michael Rose re-creates for his readers the circumstances that gave rise to fifteen operatic milestones....

Following the path of its star musician John Coltrane, Impulse Records cut a creative swath through the 1960s and 1970s with the politically charged avant-garde jazz that defined the label's...

Gary Giddins has been called "the best jazz writer in America today" ( Esquire ). Louis Armstrong has been called the most influential jazz musician of the century. Together this...

LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE 'A thrilling and essential social history that details the rebellious youth movement that helped change the world' Rolling Stone'A riveting and inspiring history...

From the formation of Wham! to his untimely death, this is the ultimate biography of George Michael. George Michael is an enigma. He was one of the most open and...

On January 13, 1968, Johnny Cash (1932-2003) took the stage at Folsom Prison in Folsom, California. The concert and the live album, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison , propelled him...

_______________'A coolly literary masterpiece' - Greil Marcus, Esquire'Sad, funny, brilliant' - The Daily Telegraph'In classic fish-out-of-water fashion Young writes with wry amusement alongside a fair bit of affection for his...

Observer Book of the YearA raucous and vividly dishy memoir by the only woman on the masthead of Rolling Stone Magazine in the Sixties. A female Almost Famous.In 1971, Robin...

In her bestselling autobiography Bedsit Disco Queen, Tracey Thorn recalled the highs and lows of a thirty-year career in pop music. But with the touring, recording and extraordinary anecdotes, there...

Little Susie from Detroit grew up to be legendary rocker Suzi Quatro, international superstar musician and actress, icon of the Seventies. The transformation was fuelled by huge talent, determination, hard...

In 1976, Larry Mullen Jr decided to form a band and put a poster on his school noticeboard looking for others with an ambition to be rock stars. Little did...