Music

How does music reflect the key moments in our lives? How do we choose the works that inspire, delight, comfort or console? Fiona Maddocks selects 100 classical works from across...

Emerging from the jazz clubs of the early '50s, skiffle - a uniquely British take on American folk and blues - caused a sensation among a generation of kids who...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDS 2018'Fierce, direct, unashamed. She masks nothing ... Scythes through the myths, the distortions, the adornments and finds the rich, distinctive stories...

Since 2000, when this biography was first published, Menuhin's name has not faded from public attention, as often happens in the decades after the death of a popular performing artist....

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PENDERYN MUSIC BOOK PRIZE 2017The Rise, The Fall, and The Rise is the extraordinary story, in her own words, of Brix Smith Start. Best known for her...

Mike Love is a founding member of the Beach Boys and the lead singer and lyricist of their biggest hits. With their lush vocals and endlessly inventive arrangements, the band...

Mike Love is a founding member, lyricist and vocalist of The Beach Boys, considered to be the most popular American band in history, with 13 Gold Albums, 55 top-100 singles,...

Rapturous in its ability to depict the creative process, Words Without Music allows readers to experience that sublime moment of creative fusion when life merges with art. Biography lovers will...

There were many reasons Moby was never going to make it as a DJ and musician in the New York club scene of the late 1980s and early 90s. This...

'They are not for you but for a later age!' Ludwig van Beethoven, on the Opus 59 quartetsBeethoven's sixteen string quartets are some of the most extraordinary and challenging pieces...

'They are not for you but for a later age!' Ludwig van Beethoven, on the Opus 59 quartets Beethoven's sixteen string quartets are some of the most extraordinary and challenging...

The only in-depth biographical account of the legendary lead singer of Joy Division, written by his widow. Includes a foreword by Jon Savage and an introduction by Joy Division drummer,...

In the early nineties, a group of disaffected and fiercely political young men from the Welsh valleys exploded onto a British music scene still in thrall to rave and acid...

Think 'Woodstock' and the mind turns to the seminal 1969 festival. But Woodstock itself was over sixty miles away, and already a key location in the rock landscape as a...

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...