Examines the trajectories, linearities and paradoxes which have constituted contemporary British music. Provides an account of how British music came to be what it is in the 1990s.

A cultural history charting the rise and fall of Russian patriotism during the first few years of the Great War. Illustrated with period prints, posters and broadsides, the book traces the evolution of patriotic symbolism in popular entertainments and cultural production.

Sporting Sounds presents an eclectic collection of essays, all of which are concerned with various relationships between sport and music. This unique book includes a range of international case studies, examines the use of music as a motivational aid for players, and the historical roots of music in sport.

First Published in 1998. This book is a comprehensive annotated bibliography of writings about the life, times, and music of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957). Over 1,000 sources in 11 different languages are represented, from the earliest writings, which appeared in the 1890s, to studies published through 1994. Historical information and background are supplied together with an indication of the reliability of each source. Translations of studies into English, German, and French are noted, particularly important in a field where so many items are in Finnish and Swedish. Introductory essays to each section discuss Sibelius in different contexts: for example, vis--vis his contemporaries in Scandinavia, in relation to folk music, in reception history, and in the scholarly literature. Individual musical compositions have their own sections with bibliography. Comprehensive indexes cover the musical works, authors, and people and subjects mentioned.

This book explores the historical-cultural interactions between French concert music and American jazz across 1900-65, from both perspectives.

"Gioachino Rossini was one of the most influential as well as one of the most industrious and emotionally complex of the great nineteenth-century composers. Between 1810 and 1829, he wrote thirty-nine operas, a body of work, comic and serious, which transformed Italian opera, and radically altered the course of opera in France." "His retirement from operatic composition in 1829, at the age of 37, was widely assumed to be the act of a talented but lazy man. In reality, political events and a series of debilitating illnesses were the determining factors. After drafting the Stabat mater in 1832, Rossini wrote no music of consequence for the best part of twenty-five years, before the clouds lifted and he began composing again in Paris in the late 1850s. During this glorious Indian summer of his career, he wrote 150 songs and solo piano pieces - his 'Sins of Old Age' - and his final masterpiece, the Petite Messe solennelle." "The image of Rossini as a gifted but feckless amateur - the witty, high-spirited bon vivant who dashed off The Barber of Seville in a mere thirteen days - persisted down the years, until the centenary of his death in 1968 inaugurated a process of re-evaluation by scholars, performers, and writers. The original 1985 edition of Richard Osborn's Rossini redefined the life and provided detailed analyses of the complete Rossini oeuvre. Twenty years on, all Rossini's operas have been staged and recorded, a Critical Edition of his works is well advanced, and a scholarly edition of his correspondence, including 250 previously unknown letters from Rossini to his parents, is in progress."--BOOK JACKET.