Joni Mitchell is one of the foremost singer-songwriters of the late twentieth century. Yet despite her reputation, influence, and cultural importance, a detailed appraisal of her musical achievement is still lacking. Whitesell presents a through exploration of Mitchell's musical style, sound, and structure in order to evaluate her songs from a musicological perspective. His analyses are conceived within a holistic framework that takes account of poetic nuance, cultural reference, and stylistic evolution over a long, adventurous career. Mitchell's songs represent a complex, meticulously crafted body of work. The Music of Joni Mitchell offers a comprehensive survey of her output, with many discussions of individual songs, organized by topic rather than chronology. Individual chapters each explore a different aspect of her craft, such as poetic voice, harmony, melody, and large-scale form. A separate chapter is devoted to the central theme of personal freedom, as expressed through diverse symbolic registers of the journey quest, bohemianism, creative license, and spiritual liberation. Previous accounts of Mitchell's songwriting have tended to favor her poetic vision, expansive verse structures, and riveting vocal delivery. Whitesell fills out this account with special attention to musical technique, showing how such traits as complex or conflicting sonorities, dualities of harmonic mode, dialectical tensions of texture and register, intricately layered instrumental figuration, and a variable vocal persona are all essential to her distinctive identity as a songwriter. The Music of Joni Mitchell develops a set of conceptual tools geared specifically to Mitchell's songs, in order to demonstrate the extent of her technical innovation in the pop song genre, to give an account of the formal sophistication and rhetorical power characterizing her work as a whole, and to provide grounds for the recognition of her intellectual stature as a composer within her chosen field.

Song of the Stars,?written by bestselling author Sally Lloyd-Jones, takes children on the journey of Advent and the anticipation of Jesus’ arrival. All of creation comes together in this poetic and majestic telling of the Christmas story.Join every creature as they celebrate the arrival of Jesus! It’s time! It's time! Snuggle close with little ones as you read through this beautiful story about how all of creation is waiting for and celebrating the arrival of Jesus. From the woodland creatures to the depth of the sea, every creature comes together during this Advent season to share the word that Jesus is coming. Beautifully illustrated and told from the perspective of the animals and all creation,?Song of the Stars: features poetic text that is perfect for children ages 4-7 makes a great read aloud with parents and grandparents during the Christmas season is ideal for Advent and Christmas Eve story time explores the joy, excitement, and celebration of creation and the coming of Jesus inspires discussions of why Advent is observed celebrates the nativity story in a unique and touching way This sweet picture book is great for Christmas-themed story times and as an addition for your little one’s library that will be treasured for many years.

Music provides a unique and powerful means of promoting communication and social interaction in students with learning difficulties. In this collection, Pat Lloyd brings together 46 songs composed or adapted for use with children with communication problems. Each of the songs features a vocal line and piano accompaniment and can be listened to on the accompanying online audio files included with the book. Simplified guitar versions are also provided for a selection of the songs. Pat Lloyd provides suggestions for how each song can be used and developed to encourage communication and social interaction, and lists a range of possible objectives for each one. Advocating a flexible approach, she demonstrates how musical activity can be adapted easily and successfully to the specific needs of individual students. Enjoyable and easy to use, this is an ideal resource for specialist and non-specialist music instructors working to improve the communication and social skills of students with learning difficulties, including those with additional autism.

Primitive Baptist singing traditions in the South. "This collection of essays, best described as an extended set of liner notes to its accompanying compact disc, frames its topic with deceptive modesty. Benjamin Lloyd (1804-60) was a Primitive Baptist preacher, who in 1841 published some 535 hymn texts under the title Primitive Hymns. Lloyd's Hymnal (as it is often called now) has been a small but consistent seller ever since, finding wide use among Primitive Baptists throughout the South. The CD [as well as the book appropriately uses Lloyd's as a point of reference from which to navigate the varied landscape of folk worship in the South. Those who find beauty in the music and worship of the southern folk will be overwhelmed by the sounds and the spiritual intensity; those who grapple with the tangled biracial culture of the South will find a key to understanding the devotion of southerners, black and white, to this small book." -- The Alabama Review

A seminal work by one of the most influential figures of the English folk revival of the 1950s, Folk Song in England (1967) is an expansive account of the development of English traditional song, from the very oldest, ritual verse, through epic balladry, to the development of lyrical song in the industrial era. In a unique and ambitious approach, Lloyd marries the tradition of folk-song scholarship, largely derived from Cecil Sharp, with the radical historiography of E. P. Thompson, and in so doing produces a work of exceptional insight. In particular, his defining of 'industrial folk song' reveals traditional verse as an ebullient, living expression of the working people, perfectly adaptable to reflect their ways and conditions of life.